This is so true. And just to further the point, productivity has gone up. Many jobs are faster & easier & take less time and fewer people to do. So more stuff is getting done per work hour. And yet, as you say, its somehow harder to afford cost of living on the pay of those work hours. So where is all that extra productivity going?

A lot of it goes to waste, possibly 'undervalued' by market distortions. (For example, tech like phones and laptops and TVs, take huge amounts of work to create - but are somehow relatively cheap. A low-cost wireless mouse costs about as much as buying lunch. That's pretty weird considering what's involved. The churn of using and replacing that stuff is sucking up a lot of productivity behind the scenes.) But yeah, the bigger effect is growing inequality. Ultra wealthy people and company sucking up all the profits from our productivity; and spending it on... well, a lot of stuff. One example that comes to mind is the enormous amount of resources going into building and running data centres at the moment. Land, water, raw materials, basic labour, skilled labour... and some promise that it is all going to be worth it, but right now its essentially just our collective wealth getting poured into machines that are currently doing more harm than good. It's a level of resource tradeoff that no normal person would make. But at the ultra-wealthy top, the cost doesn't matter so much to them, and the benefits including locking people into a cycle of dependency - so that the owners can say at the top unchallenged. It's not hard to see how that's a good deal for them, but not for anyone else.