Also often media fail to disclose stuff at a *median per capita basis*, so while GDP (a fairly flaky metric on it's own as is) is growing, it's often because there's more people than the last record period and not because the average person is richer or actual economic growth.
As a lot of economists have said, if you forget the lived experience of people you are doomed to misrepresent things.
It also doesn't help when politicans will be incentivised to ramp up things like migration make numbers look better when the average person is actually poorer than last year. Conservative politicans like to pretend to dislike migration but then basically overuse it to hid how much their robbing the public and underfunding domestic education that could ironically reduce dependence on migration.