Because I’m really curious what you mean when you say we’re more free than ever. Free time especially is what eludes most people of my peer group; endless tv shows to stream is meaningless without free time for example.
Specific countries may be failing to improve, but if you're from the USA remember that your country is 4.25% of the world, and very few of you were ever in abject poverty in the beginning of that timeframe.
Global abject poverty as a standard is roughly "sleeping rough" in western terms (more precisely, it's 2.15 US dollars of purchasing power per day), and the number of people worldwide at that level has gone from 1930 million in 1994 to 1510 million in 2004 to 806 million in 2014 to 693 million today.
But expenses expand to fill the available budget, so the actual cost of living is higher, as people earn more to spend more to get more.
(If you wish you had more free time but don't negotiate a pay cut in return for shorter work hours, it just means you value the money more than your time.)
Housing is the biggest culprit. It has gone up something like 5x in the last 20 years, while salaries have increased maybe 20%.
What people actually pay for it, though, in terms of mortgage payments as a share of income, is at basically the same level (6%) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MDSP
As long as people buy houses on credit, high house prices only reflect that mortgages are cheap.