Yeah, I mean, I keep hearing people complaining about how hard it is to be "middle class" now, compared to previous generations. But everyone seems to forget that the definition of middle class has changed. Several decades ago, middle class didn't mean you had a huge house, 2-3 cars, kids in private school, yearly vacations, multiple televisions/smartphones/computers/consoles, etc.
There are valid arguments with how ridiculously the cost of education has risen (although that can still be somewhat mitigated by choosing in-state tuition, community college, working through college, etc), but other than that... I just don't feel terribly bad for people who cry about how hard it is to be middle class.
One point you've made is worthy of extra discussion. You listed a bunch of luxuries, but you didn't use the word "and" or "or". The distinction is worth making.
A whole bunch of people who identify themselves as middle class make "and"-ish assumptions about consumptions. They don't limit themselves to just one or two indulgences, and make cutbacks and compromises elsewhere. They feel inadequate if they aren't indulging in several different and unrelated luxuries, and the idea of trading one off for another is unknown. This is a very new development.
Middle class, going back to when P.T. Barnum popularized the phrase in the early to mid-1800's, meant a very special thing. It referred to a family that was not financially independent and that had to have one or more breadwinner exchanging labor or services for pay, but that had both an income surplus and a time surplus. Middle-class people were sometimes small business owners or entrepreneurs, but sometimes worked for others by providing knowledge work or skilled labor. They did not necessarily own the means of economic production (and the distinction wasn't relevant to class until Marx and Engels emphasized it).
Compared to working-class families, middle-class families had more income than they needed to get by. The income surplus had to be big enough to allow the family to pay its expenses reliably, to save for emergencies, to cover the expenses associated with caring for young, old, or injured members of the family, to acquire movable property and possibly even real estate, and perhaps even to invest.
Compared to working-class families, middle-class families did not have to devote all their waking hours to earning a survival wage. The time surplus meant that the adults in the family did not spend every waking hour focused on their own survival or on caregiving for children or elders, and had time and resources available for recreation. Division of labor, for example, with women staying at home and investing their labor in the education of the next generation instead of working outside the home to earn income, was one luxury that became possible for at least some middle-class families. A middle-class family could therefore accrue, and potentially consume, more than a working-class family. These options were still unavailable to the laboring class, and would not necessarily have been legal under some of the really old-fashioned feudal legal systems that had (and enforced) consumption limits based on social class.
Distinctions existed between middle-class and upper-class families. In the upper class, a certain degree of financial independence was considered mandatory. However (and I'm using Edith Wharton for an example since her fiction was commended for its realism) there wasn't a minimum consumption level for the upper class. In "The House of Mirth", set in New York in the early 1900's, there were characters who belonged to the upper class who had only enough income from their investments to afford to rent a room in someone else's house. This-- and marrying someone else who had money-- was considered preferable to getting a job, and far more respectable. On the other side of the pond, Lord Byron and most of his social set were known for living in rented attic space when the literary income was sparse, rather than answering a help-wanted ad. Scaling one's consumption to suit income
was in fact normal for all classes. It wasn't that unusual to see a lawyer whose income came solely from labor (as in, a member of the middle class) enjoying a higher standard of living and more financial stability than a member of an old-money family whose inherited wealth produced a much smaller income.
So, a person might see a middle-class family buying a house or sending their children to university, but not both at the same time. In fact, the family often had to choose which child got the education opportunity. Also, when a middle-class or conservative upper-class family spent money on something, they generally expected to have something to show for it. Conspicuous consumption in one area often required cutbacks in another, and only the extremely wealthy were expected to spend freely and not worry about the cost.
TL;DR version... as a society, we've got large numbers of people who could be financially stable choosing to overspend and overconsume. In fact it's become the norm. Part of the problem is that it's no longer customary to consider an overindulgence in one area as something that requires compensation in another area.