If you think about how the media and government potray periods of “growth” and “prosperity” it's using metrics like unemployment rates, S&P 500 growth, average 401K growth, tax revenues collected and quoting polls about economic sentiment. All of those things are about how rapidly wealth grows in aggregate for an economy, it's never about how the average citizen is feeling mentally or how their finances are doing relative to their purchasing power over time. The last couple of years are a perfect example, once we got past the V-shaped Covid-recovery, the stock market was at an all-time high, unemployment was low but everyone was miserable because we are all still reeling from the fact that we are working for companies that dump more and more work on fewer and fewer people (even before the inflation problem). Until we demand an “Average person happiness index” that is not driven by corporate profit measures, we are just cogs in a wheel that isn't spinning for us. All of our politicians are focused on improving the aggregate economy – not the economy of the household. Mandatory maternity/paternity leave, paid sabbaticals, student loan forgiveness, mandatory paid vacation, universal health care, rent control, enforcement of landlord-tenant laws – THESE are the things that will improve the average person's life (in the US at least) – not Amazon's market capitalization going up another $100 billion, not the unemployment rate dropping another half-percent because more people got shitty jobs they hate.