People are frustrated. Incomes are below the levels of a half century ago, and there are a growing number of things you “have” to pay for.
Internet, streaming services, increasingly deregulated and less subsidized utilities, private equity hyperinflating housing costs, etc.
Sure, we live better in many ways.. but that too takes its toll. Vehicles are much, much more advanced (and expensive), for example. Instead of owning land and living in whatever you can build, people live in better accommodations but own nothing. Credit replaces savings with the promise of instant gratification. In every transaction there are parasitic costs all the way down in the name of efficiency, JIT logistics, payment processors, etc. the costs of these “savings” is passed on the the consumer, while the temporary balance sheet boost is distributed to the capital class through stock buybacks or dividends.
In the end there is a good or service that you “need” for every penny you can possibly make if you are on the top of the bell curve.
The economy is fundamentally a two party system, those who generate and shed surplus value (wage workers), and those who seek to recover the fraction off the value that the workers were given in exchange for their time.
Companies exist to harvest and concentrate this surplus. When the distinction between the workers and the companies is small, as with small enterprise, worker-owned businesses, etc this system actually works fairly well.
It also works well even for large companies working on physical or technological frontiers. They benefit much more by moving the bar in innovation or resource exploitation than by optimizing profitability on a fixed resource.
When it is huge corporate conglomerates in crowded or saturated markets, that exist primarily to enrich investors from a relatively static market, it becomes less clear where the benefits fade into the burden that these entities place on their host populations.
The outcome we see today is the counterintuitive result of a relatively efficient market - total living costs will rise to consume all of the available “surplus” resources. Nature abhors a vacuum, and unspent cash makes a howling roar that attracts capitalist parasites from miles away. It’s the unmentioned corollary of the efficient market, and it is turbocharged by regulatory capture (thus the battle over community broadband, right to repair, etc)
The same system that incentivizes rational actors to seek superior value incentivizes their counterparts to create vendor lock-in, soft price fixing, hostile supply chain manipulation, deceptive trade practices, regulatory capitulation, and more. It’s often more profitable to manipulate incentives than it is to create a superior value position.
The net result of this push-pull between entrepreneurial innovation and parasitic trade practices is the sucking up of all significant sources of discretionary spending. So if you are doing well at an average level, you will be living paycheck to paycheck just to buy the “essentials”.
This is a systemic problem endemic to capitalism when there are no more commons (frontiers) to consume.
This is probably the best argument for aggressive space colonization and industrialization.
A wild, unpredictable frontier is the only suitable substitute for the cleansing power of large scale war to clean out the graft, grift and cobwebs from entrenched capital. Otherwise, every erstwhile efficient market becomes a new frontier for “inefficiency farming”.