I mean, mathematically speaking, having your high-income years happen earlier in life is significantly better because of the way compound interest works.
What do you do when 'high-earning' last decade is somewhat laughable to this one? Was compounding worth it when inflation just gobbled up all of the effort you out into those earnings faster than interest could compound?
Some napkin paper math. I googled "largest index fund" and got these 3 results:
Vanguard 500: 3x return over last 10 years
Vanguard total stock market index fund: 2x over last 10 years
SWPPX: 3x over last 10 years.
Google is telling me inflation from 2013 to 2023 is 41%.
So even with inflation accounted for you're looking at a 50-150% ROI over 10 years. Maybe I just got incredibly lucky picking index funds, so I googled the total market capitalization of US domestic companies and that grew from about 15 to 30 trillion. This stat seems to be wonkier, other estimates claim 45 trillion (probably a more inclusive estimate counting smaller companies).
But TL;DR: No, inflation did not gobble up the returns on investments
The standard way is to measure the amount of stuff money can buy, where "stuff" is daily necessities and so on. But prices are just relative. It can be argued that such daily necessities like food, clothes, etc. have actually gotten "cheaper", and the increases in stock and other asset prices are a function of how much money is printed by central banks. (There's a strong correlation there, at least.)
It's not the standard narrative, but it's something to think about in such cases where these numbers are absolutely crucial to your life plans.
There's also the element of the US stock market basically outperforming everyone else in the past decade. (And it's mostly because of tech.) If you pick a couple non-US indices the numbers look much more shaky.
