Likewise not having a smartphone means you're less able to participate in the economy, and can in fact impair one's social life as most things are coordinated via group chat these days.

If you want to go live like it's 1910, that is an option, but unless you're willing to become Amish you will find it socially isolating and surprisingly expensive. It will not fix your economic woes, it will simply swap them for the economic woes of yesteryear and you'll learn first-hand why we developed things like washing machines.

IMO the real culprit is the financialization of everything over the last 50 years, and lax anti-trust enforcement. Since the 70s, every excuse in the book has been used to not pay workers more. Your house is now an asset! Your company-managed pension is now a self-managed 401k! You can get loans for everything under the sun, endless credit! Why care about the total cost of goods when you can just pay it off in installments? Anything but actually paying the middle class a bigger piece of the pie so they might be able to buy something with actual savings like we're taught to do as kids. Competition to bring down prices? Nope, we're approving every corporate consolidation from now until the end of time and bailing them out with taxpayer money when they fail! They jumped the shark a bit proposing 50 year mortgages to fix the housing crisis.

It's always sold to the public as "freedom", because the public is/was the most gullible entity. Mediocre people love pretending that they're the masters of their own destiny.

The net effect is that there is no adjustment to lifestyle you can make to offset the rising cost of everything without sacrificing your ability to prosper in the first place. If there were, West Virginia would be prospering right now. You can go full Diogenes if you like, that's all romantic until you get sick, and God forbid you have dependents who look to you for food and healthcare and you tell them that you can't provide it because that would require lifestyle inflation.

Not everyone wants a 1 hr long commute, and since we took away remote work we're stuffing everyone into expensive cities where people spend the remainder of their 50 percent not taken by taxes on housing (and health too in some cases)

It's a disaster.

They didn’t say that? Nor was it even implied? What the hell?

All they said was that EVEN free time is a form of wealth that not all enjoy, and free time does often correlate to how well you can express your care for someone. And they are absolutely, without a single shadow of a doubt, correct.

All I said was if you have to work 3 jobs just to pay rent, you probably aren't going to be caring for many people no matter how much you might want to, simply due to limited hours in the day. Never mind people with actual disabilities.