There’s a peculiar kind of vertigo that comes with being an affluent American in 2026. You’ve made it. By nearly every historical metric, you are living in spectacular abundance. You have a six-figure income, a retirement account, a nice car. And yet something feels wrong — crowded, competitive, precarious. The airport lounge is too full. The housing market makes no sense. The life you thought you’d paid for keeps getting more expensive.
This is not an illusion. It is, economists are increasingly arguing, a structural feature of the new American economy — one that a sweeping recent report from the American Enterprise Institute attempted to describe, but only partially explained. Because the real story isn’t just about income brackets and inflation adjustments. It’s about a nation that has grown so wealthy, so fast, that it has lost the ability to recognize its own prosperity — and about a media environment that has systematically replaced the old, grounded benchmarks of success with an endless, algorithmically curated window into the lives of the ultrarich.
