Pretty much if you ever double your salary you will come out ahead as everything else doesn't double. (And even if it does, your savings also doubled so you can retire to a lower cost of living and come out ahead).

If you go from say 120k to 240k in salary your housing may go from say 1k (12k/year) to 3k (36k/year) but at the end of the year 120k-12k is 108k while 240k-36k is 204 which is a net gain of 96k!

Of course you still need to eat and stuff but when you check out the "Regional Price Parity" [1] you'll see that nowhere do things actually become twice as expensive. So you're really getting a 2x boost in salary in exchange for a 1.3x increase in expenses.

[1]: https://www.bea.gov/data/prices-inflation/regional-price-par...