I wonder if it's the change in the trend rather than the change in the state. My great grandparents came to the US as immigrants with zero wealth in the early 1900's. My grandparents were children during the depression, lived their formative years during WWII and raised "baby boomer" children, and had a modest but comfortable retirement. My dad was the first person in his family to go to college and had a relatively prosperous professional career and a nice big house in the suburbs and we got to experience ~yearly vacations.

I realize that there are many life stories here and this may not be reflective of everybody's expectations, but when I was young (pre-9/11) it felt like part of the zeitgeist that "every generation has it a little better than the last" (at least, in the material sense). Now there seems to be a prevailing sentiment that for the first time in living memory people's conditions in the aggregate are trending downward rather than upwards.

I believe that humans adapt to their environment and I think any one can live a happy life without X or Y luxury, in this case a family trip.

What I’m talking about is a sudden change in normalcy - since you were a kid every year there was a trip. Now there’s not a trip.

If I put you in a loincloth with a club in the wilderness, you might be pretty upset at that. But literally millions (billions?) of our cro magnon ancestors did it just fine.