Back then, the cost of a gallon of gas was about $1.10 – and back then, I was a young guy without a lot of money to spend on gas, but I could still afford to regularly fill up the old muscle car's tank because it only cost me about $20 to do that, back then.

Today, it costs about $90 to fill up that same tank and it's much harder to afford that, even though I ought to be able to afford more today rather than back then, since I'm more financially secure after thirty-plus years of working than I was back then, when I'd just begun working.

Except I'm not.

Something has changed – and it is more than just what people refer to as "inflation."

If you plug the $1.10 per gallon cost of gas back in '94 into the inflation calculator the government makes available – see here – you get an "inflation adjusted" 2026 figure of $2.48 per gallon. This is off by about $1.50 per gallon in my area, where regular unleaded costs about $4 per gallon as of yesterday.

It's more than just that, though.

If you are old enough to remember what other things cost – and what you had available to spend – back in the '90s, then you know it is not just "inflation" (or the cost of gas) that's made things seem more expensive by dint of us needing to have more dollars to buy the same things today than we needed to buy those things (like gas) back in the '90s.

I remember what I was earning, back then. It was not much – and yet, I had enough coming in to be able to afford to both buy the old muscle car (which was then just an old car, admittedly, rather than the "classic" it is now) as well as fill it up regularly and pay the rent/mortgage I had to pay back in those days, plus all of the other expenses – such as for food and utilities and so on – that everyone has to pay who isn't homeless or a government dole-receiver. I was able to afford all that, as a young guy just starting out. Here I am, 30-something years older and even without having to pay one of the major expenses I was paying back then – the rent/mortgage, because I now nominally "own" the home I still have to pay rent to the government in order to not be evicted from – and it is much more difficult for me to fill-up the old muscle car's tank because I have fewer actual dollars to buy the gas with.