- lower income families struggle for upwards mobility
- we are moving ever more towards a full material world, where you need to have a lot of disposable income just to keep up (remember the first over 1000 usd iPhone and people saying it was too much?)
- social media keeps reminding us that there are “successful” people who have all the stuff you dream, and can burn money (all a lie, but if desperate and poorly educated you buy it)
- vanishing of social construct: less weight of family in peoples life, less local communities (replaced by only pseudo-communities as twitter or insta) which translates into less emotional support, pushing you to consumerism for solace.
It’s no surprise that the hope of a quick buck (be it sports betting or also damaging scratch cards / lotteries) thrive in the context, and in particular with people desperate or with poor understanding of odds and biases….
Edit: I don’t think is necessary a poor-people-only problem, I think this is a symptom that a new definition of poverty is brewing - one beyond financial indicators… (stale life, no prospects of moving up, disenfranchising of society, resentment for feeling rug pulled from underneath, prone to absorb/consume anything that makes you feel “in the loop” or relevant like fake news or crazy theories, etc). I believe we are seeing this all across the Western world, yet us and our leaders fail to address it.
The amount of money especially young people have to fork off of their paychecks just to have a place to live is outright insane.
You may have meant this facetiously, but just to be clear—there is no "need to" "keep up". I'm a software engineer making more than enough money and I still use budget Android phones for years at a time. We live in a world where corporations have persuaded people that they "need to" live beyond their means, but most things are still optional or doable with a budget version.