It very much varies depending on where you look, but your timescale is skewing your comparison. If you were to look at the Japanese economy today compared to the past 50-100 years, it would look like everything is amazing because of the massive economic boom in the 80s. But that only lasted about a decade before stagnating for the past 30-40 years, and that stagnation has become so bad that Japan is very much at risk of deflation destroying their economy. The life expectancy in the US has fallen several years in a row since COVID.

There have been major improvements in society in the past century, but that means little to the man who can’t afford insulin anymore because the pharmaceutical company decided to increase the price by 1,000% because the US government won’t do anything to stop them, or the millions of Americans saddled with absurd amounts of college debt that will even follow them through bankruptcy - the only form of debt that does - because they changed the laws in the past 15 years to ensure that it does. In the US, generations post Baby Boomers are objectively doing worse than their predecessors across many aspects used to measure quality of life - largely those related to finances in any way, shape, or form. I just watched a video about the infantilisation of Millennial women that spent a long time talking about how the entire generation’s inability to hit the same metrics considered for “success/adulthood” in life compared to their parents has given rise to stuff like the use of “adult” as a verb instead of a noun (adulting - a thing you do on occasion instead of a thing you are).

Noteworthy quotes from the video relevant to this discussion:

• There are arguably four main markers that constitute traditional adulthood: housing, finances, marriage and parenthood, and agency.
• According to a 2021 study in the US, Millennials had the lowest home ownership rate of any adult generation. Only 43% of Millennials were homeowners, well below the average of 65%.
• There’s been an almost 15% rise in the number of non-dependent adult children living at home in the past decade. About 30% of 25 to 29 year olds now live with their parents and more than one in ten adult children age 30 to 34 do.
• According to Forbes, 52% of non home-owning Millennials aren’t saving for a down payment. And of these, many cite underpaying jobs or joblessness as the reason. So it isn’t just that homeownership is becoming a reality for Millennials later in their life than the previous generations, because for many it isn’t considered a reality at all.
• It’s not exactly news, but it is worth including that wage stagnation and rising house prices mean the income levels and therefore purchasing power of the average Millennial is much less than it was even a couple of decades ago. According to reporting from the Urban Institute, those earning the median income in the US or below can only afford 20% of the properties on sale in the US. Compare that to the roughly 50% of homes that they would be able to afford in 2016, and you can see the pattern here. And this is especially impactful to those on minimum wage.
• According to 2019 research by the Economic Policy Institute, the federal minimum wage was worth 17% less than in 2009 and 31% less than in 1968. If minimum wage had kept pace with productivity since 1968, it would now be $24 an hour instead of $7.25. And we see this across the Millennial experience. Hobbies become side hustles as the need to monetize spare time to keep up with the rising costs of living means salaries aren’t enough anymore.
• Journalist Sarah Hayford investigated the birth rate in the US across the decades and found “After the highs of the baby boom in the mid-20th century and the lows of the baby bust in the 1970s, birth rates were relatively stable for nearly 50 years. But during the Great Recession, from 2007-2009, birth rates declined sharply - and they’ve kept falling. In 2007, average birth rates were right around 2 children per woman. By 2021, levels had dropped more than 20%, close to the lowest level in a century.”
• Finances of course play into this. Weddings are expensive and children even more so. In America, without access to a nationalized health service, even birth itself can be unaffordable. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, labour costs on average are more than $4,500 per childbirth even if you’re insured and the price of maternity and newborn surgeries has risen by 60% over the past decade. That’s not to mention childcare costs.[…]One survey of almost 600 millennials found that nearly three in five of those without children said they didn’t have any because of their financial situation.
• Figures from the Office of National Statistics in England and Wales showed that only 213,000 heterosexual couples had married that year, down more than 50% since the peak in 1972. The number of 25 to 35 year olds who are unmarried had more than doubled since 1991.
• Adulthood is often perceived through the lens of you “leaving the nest” - when someone goes out into the world and makes a life independent of their parents; no longer living at home, depending on family income, or being under their parents’ control. Adulthood in this way is marked by a kind of agency and competence that you don’t have as a child or teen. You can make your own decisions, create a life for yourself that’s built around your own sense of self and your own values. The three previous markers of adulthood I talked about - stable housing outside your family home, healthy finances, marriage and parenthood - they’re all linked. They interweave and compound each other. They allow a sense of this adult independence and agency; but once one drops off, the others come tumbling down as well. If you have no stable place to live, no stable income, no stable sense of family, what does a stable sense of adult self look like?

The rest of the video isn’t really relevant to this topic, but it’s an interesting watch with a good perspective on the experience of Millennial women so I’ll link it here. It even has stuff like a section about how all this affects queer women specifically and how the LGBTQ+ community has a different sense of time compared to cis/hetero people due to the environment they grow up in.

Burying one’s head in the ground is a terrible response. If everyone were to do that, nothing will ever get better. We need to be aware of the things we can change and work towards that goal.

Also, living longer is not always better. Go visit a memory care facility or a person who has been brought back from the brink of death only to prolong his suffering.