With homeownership elusive for many, food and energy prices inflated, and the looming fear of artificial intelligence replacing jobs en masse, 69% of people think the American Dream no longer holds true or never did, a Wall Street Journal-NORC poll finds. This was the highest level since the poll began in 1987.

“One of our superpowers as a country is our relentless optimism,” Stanford University economics professor Neale Mahoney told The Wall Street Journal. “It is the fuel for entrepreneurship and other exceptional achievements. It sort of saddens me.”

Just 25% think they have a good chance of improving their standard of living, another record low. This is backed up by people describing a sense of economic fragility. Top-of-mind is home ownership increasingly becoming out of reach due to higher prices, mortgages, taxes, and insurance.

“Rents are sky-high,” noted Christina Stephens, a 46-year-old technology worker. “Inflation is killing us. A lot of kids are having to go back home. They don’t want to go back home.”

Jerry Esch, 56 and recently laid off from Microsoft after working there for 20 years, said home prices today are “ridiculous. How we address that is the biggest thing in fixing that American Dream.”

Saving adequately for retirement is another tremendous worry adding to Americans’ growing angst about their futures.

As difficult as it is to achieve these milestones now, a majority thinks they are likely to become even more problematical for future generations.

“There’s limits to what hard work can actually bring people these days,” said Bill Sanchez, a 30-year-old army veteran now working as a criminal defense attorney making $72,000 a year.

A mere 17% in the poll said the U.S. economy surpasses all others in the world. Thirty-nine percent said other nations have better economies, up from 24% in 2021.

Sixty percent in total said inflation is causing them either major financial strains (28%) or minor strains (32%). This may be because prices rising under cumulative inflation rarely go back down — and is notable since the percentage of Americans bemoaning inflation is the same now, with inflation at 2.7%, as it was in the March 2023 poll, when inflation was nearly double, at 5%.

Living through the Great Recession of 2008 and the COVID pandemic are two other seismic events that also shifted the ground under Americans’ feet, reasons Karlyn Bowman, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Today, Americans are facing “a triple whammy” of inflation, job market concerns, and inflation, Bowman said.

Then there is AI supplanting jobs. Esch warned about the short-sighted repercussions of AI-driven mass layoffs: “If you lay off too many people, who’s going to be your customers?”

The curious thing about the fading of the longstanding faith in the American Dream is that even those earning a sizeable salary, who own a house with a low mortgage rate, and who have savings, feel uneasy because they don’t think they will be able to improve their lives any further.

“We’re better off than 80% to 90% of Americans out there, but we’d like to have a bigger house,” explained Christopher Kishel, 40, who lives in Atlanta in a four-bedroom townhouse with this wife and two-year-old son. “We’d like to be able to expand our family.”

Austin Odle, 35, unemployed and holding an M.B.A., believes he is among a growing number of Americans who have given up on pursuing a dream job for a stable one just to pay the bills and scrape by.

“I was doing everything, I thought, right, and still not feeling like I’m ahead,” Odle said. “It’s going to be what I need to do so my kids can eat.”