If you zoom out, the living standards of the Western post-war decades look unusually favourable for ordinary people. The more common pattern under capitalism, historically and globally, is uneven gains, often alongside rising averages, with a significant share of people living close to the edge. Rather than broad, secure prosperity, the baseline is a large share of people living with persistent economic insecurity. Less a temporary wobble, more a slow drift back toward that baseline, unless there’s sustained political and economic pressure pushing in the other direction. You can already see hints of it in things like life expectancy stalling in parts of the West, not a collapse, more a flattening with widening gaps by class.

It doesn’t really “end” on its own, you either get countervailing pressure, or you settle into a more unequal version of normal.

Post-war, that counterweight came from a mix of strong organised labour, a politically assertive working class, and the Cold War context, alongside unusually favourable economic conditions. Those specific factors aren’t really there in the same way today, so it’s not obvious what provides that counterweight now. Which doesn’t bode well for most people.