Your and my conversation sure takes me back to my younger childhood days, when families bought a home within their affordability range, they worked hard to pay it off, and once they had the home paid off, they didn't look to move and upgrade again but rather, they looked to maybe put on a small addition, possible do a few renovations, and then they enjoyed the ride, as in hunkered-down and enjoyed their home.
It wasn't unheard of to still see families residing in the same home they bought some 40 years earlier, and people seemed happier, more content living life simply and uncomplicated, unlike today where from all that I see, people tend to welcome hardship and stressors by looking for more when they can afford so little.
I hear it often nowadays... "both couples have to work to get by today", and while there is a shade of truth behind that way of thinking, I don't buy into it fully. When I was young and growing, families had a single family vehicle they relied on, and I was hard-pressed to count on one hand how many families had recreational vehicles or boats to their name. Very few, today however, not so, I see enormous homes rising all the time with not just a single garage anymore like it used to be, but multi-garages, and all bays are filled, and even more surprising is seeing those newly built homes seemingly vacant or uninhabited most of the time, because the couples are too busy being slaves to their jobs. The question always arises in me... for what? For materialistic possessions? You can have it.
Call me old-fashioned, but our average home is nothing fancy, but it's warm, comfortable, welcoming, and full of love, and that's more than I can say for the cold and often clinical-like homes I see today, where there are no lights on, no movement within or outside of, and aside from the homes making a statement as to their newness, they don't hold a lick to homes like ours where the people who reside within are real people, non-materialistic people, people who you can sit down with over a cup of coffee and have an enjoyable conversation with.
While I don't take any issue with what you have said, I do feel there are additional factors at play today that put financial pressure on many people. Many things are much more expensive relative to a typical income than they were when I was growing up. Health care costs, a college education, even food and other daily items have gone up. Where pens, pencils, and notebooks were what we used in school, if I understand what I have seen in the media (print, TV, etc.) now, students are required to have a computer, which is way more expensive than the simple things we used.
When I went to college (much later in life, in the 90s), I was able to pay my way through school with a full time job and school in the evenings. I had no student loans. I doubt that I could come even close for the same degree today. I honestly don't know what those who pursue degrees in fields other than tech, medical, the sciences, or law can do to ever pay off those loans.
More in line with your observations, with both parents working, eating out becomes much more the norm. On occasion, my wife and I will stop and pickup sub sandwiches at a shop such as Subway or Jimmy John's. When we considered how far that same money could go by just buying the materials and assembling these ourselves, and to our individual liking, we stopped that practice altogether. I can't imagine how people can continue to afford that on a regular basis.
When working full time, we engineers used to go out for lunch every day back in the 80s and up through the mid-90s. Around that time, we all stopped altogether except for special occasions such as somebody new starting or somebody leaving. We are talking about people with 6 figure incomes, not minimum wage earners. We felt we couldn't afford to go out to eat anymore.
When my youngest brother died, we all congregated in Los Angeles for the funeral. As we all talked among our siblings, we began to realize that the cars we each drove and the lifestyles we had were inversely proportional to our respective incomes. A younger brother, who is an attorney made the most money and drove a car his mother in law had given him, an old Ford Probe. I was next as an engineer and I drove a Toyota Echo (still drive that same car 10 years later) I bought used for $5k cash. I have now had the car for 16 years. The youngest, who had died, drove a brand new truck that we used to go places because it was big, expensive, and comfortable, and fit all of us. All those in between followed that same arc that I mentioned here.
As I recall when working full time, with both parents and kids, they needed daycare, and it cost as much as one of the two made working full time. I can see the rationale, because if they got divorced or one of them died, the other would need a career to keep afloat (at least that is my guess giving the benefit of the doubt).
Tony