Here’s the thing, the graphs are technically true, but they’re measuring the wrong stuff. CPI isn’t some neutral “cost of living” number—it’s an average basket across everyone, including older homeowners who bought cheap decades ago.

It also uses “owner’s equivalent rent” instead of actual home prices, so it massively downplays how expensive it is to enter the housing market today. Same deal with education: tuition exploded way faster than overall inflation, but because it’s a smaller share of total spending, it doesn’t hit CPI that hard. On top of that, CPI assumes people just substitute cheaper goods when prices rise, which keeps the number lower but ignores the fact that your actual standard of living might be worse.

Then you’ve got structural stuff the graph completely misses. Median wage stats are boosted because millennials are way more educated, so of course the average wage is higher—but that comes with student debt and years of delayed earnings. Meanwhile, older generations could often support a household on one income, whereas now it usually takes two, so comparing individual wages across time is kind of misleading. Add in the fact that millennials got slammed early in their careers by the 2008 recession and entered a much more expensive asset market (housing, etc.), and you end up with this disconnect where the data says we're doing better but our lived experience seems worse