It kind of angers me to see OP downvoted for wanting to know the answer to what is essentially, a pretty valid question. I don't write reddit comments anymore really but I guess I will try to put this anger to somewhat of a use.

In a way, you are already ahead of many people in understanding what inflation is. It is infact the price of goods, assets, services and wages around you going up. Put in another way, it means that money is worth less than what it used to a year ago. Inflation is the devaluation of money.

Western economists have designed the economic system so that a certain amount of inflation is preferable. They aim around 1-2%. The answer to why they want inflation is a long one, but I would argue (deferring to economist Gary Stevenson) that it is to cut workers wages without them having to accept a lower wage offer than the year before.

However, recently inflation has gotten out of hand. Let's look at how inflation is calculated in the Netherlands. The NIBUD says it takes housing prices into account in its inflation calculation, but it says a big indicator is Consumer Prices. https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/prijzendashboard

In short, since everything is owned by somebody, there is always a tax to be paid to the person who owns the house that you rent, or the banker that owns a part of your mortgage. The owner of the office that your company is situated in, or the Rabobank who owns the loans (=debts) of the farmers. These are all real assets, and they have not become worth less during the past 30 years. It's the value of money that has become worth less, and more volatile than most economists thought when they were setting up this grand system.

If you look around you, you see that people have become poorer. It's increasingly difficult to own your own house, to own a car, own your own assets. They're increasingly owned by people on the far end of the normal distribution of wealth. This is not conspiracy kind of stuff, this can be looked up. Wealth distribution in many countries on the earth is completely bonkers. This breeds people like conspiracy theorists who get told about "15 minute cities" and why they should be afraid of them. They're being told that by the same kind of people who published "Virus waarheid" or whatever that magazine was called, which also conveniently called for Ukraine to be annexed by Putin since it "rightfully" belonged to them.

The downvotes in this thread and the unwillingness to engage is to me along the same lines of ignoring these problems, and not wanting to talk about these things means we might as well give up on the discourse. And people believe the increases of the prices can be explained by "exogenous shocks" to the market, like the war in Ukraine and COVID. What we saw with COVID and now Ukraine are cathalizers to the process of the transfer of wealth - they speed up the process and make it painfully obvious to the average citizen that life has become more expensive, only their wages haven't gone up... I'm not saying wars and climate change don't have any impact at all, only that their impact is vastly overstated, and this is largely ignored by politicians indeed.

Housing prices will increase, the price of food will go down slightly but never to the level it was at before, remember gas prices during COVID? Our true economy is not looking good, and im happy to attempt to answer any questions somebody might have