My guesses:

1. Everything costs more. A lot more.

2. Wages have stagnated for decades, unless you're in that magical IT job.

3. It's now a 2 wage earner setup to afford rent or mortgage. And smaller and less hostable residences.

4. The lower your income, the worse your schedule for planning anything. Same with friends.

5. Self-entertainment is a lot cheaper.

Basically, capitalism has squeezed out being able to afford parties, and the time commitment away from "hustling".

Even with 1995-ish, we had Married with Children, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, and Friends. All these show apartments or houses that a single worker could afford, and fund house/apartment parties. And this is a single person paying for housing.

Sure, those are fictions for TV, but it also shows just how normal and common it was, that low/middle income folks had lots of options and good amount of time. That's just no longer true for most Americans.

>Sure, those are fictions for TV

When you noticed you were relying on evidence from fiction, instead of verbally acknowledging that that was what you were doing, you should've stopped relying on the "evidence".

It might make sense every now and them to rely on fiction for evidence in domains where it is very hard to obtain any data at all, but in this particular, there is plenty of hard data of what US workers used to earn, what they earn now, what houses and food used to cost and what they cost now.

(I expect that the hard data will fail to support your belief that things have gotten significantly harder economically for the average person.)