Lifestyle inflation happened, that's it.

If you wanted to live the 1950 version of this that our grandfathers actually lived, you still could very easily.

You'd just be in Iowa or Ohio or whatever. No $1k smartphones or central A/C; no trips to Prague, no top-20 cities. Eating at restaurants maybe just a few times a year. Only one car instead of two, and at that, the cheapest car you can buy (Mitsubishi Mirage?). The house you buy could be $50k, but it will be 800 square feet, "outdated," and you'll need to put some elbow grease into it, like grandad did.

You might live somewhere really flat and boring, with long winters, far from where you grew up. You might marry the first decent gal you could find at the local church, and she probably won't look like a model. Your kids won't be going to expensive SAT prep classes, nor will they be jetting all over the state for Soccer sectionals or joining the ski team. Christmas gifts will consist of things like oranges, candy canes, socks, and maybe a new bike from Wal-Mart. The kids' "extracurriculars" will consist of riding bikes to the river to skip rocks, or building snowmen in the yard.

You'll work at the municipal water plant in Newton Iowa, or be an assistant manager at the Love's truck stop in Bismarck, ND. Maybe start a highway line striping company in Ponca City Oklahoma. It's not gonna be some glamorous white-collar work-from home kind of thing.

Vacations? Sure, take an old canvas tent and a cooler full of bologna sandwiches up to the national forest land in Indiana or up in Michigan and go camping for a week every year. Crack open a few Old Milwaukees; maybe smoke a Dutch Master's and turn the radio on. It's not gonna be a European odyssey or a tropical getaway in Tahiti every year..

The wife can stay at home too, that's for sure. Making cheap crockpot meals from whatever's on sale at Aldi's, mending your work shirts, teaching the kids to read and sing hymns. It's more than doable.

But if you've GOT to have all the newfangled extras and just CAN'T live in a place that is "boring" or "cold" or work a job that is "low status", and have an endless princely list of "needs" -- yup, the revised, redone, totally different version of the American Dream (a version your grandpa never lived) will be out of reach.

When you find it's out of reach, you'll ask: What happened? Lifestyle inflation happened. You fell for a bunch of stupid marketing. Your grandad is facepalming in heaven, wondering what the hell is wrong with you, because the life he lived is now even easier to attain than it was back in his day!