The past few years after COVID-19 have been the absolute worst; everything keeps rising—petrol, daily groceries, electricity, housing—to the point where you're barely making ends meet.
...
how do you deal with it? How do you stay optimistic?
I live in a country which does not treat their people like worthless livestock. My country covers health insurance, housing, living costs and even free mental health therapy. So I do not go into a state of desperation just because I have fallen on financially hard times. Personally, I am all for socialist democracy. I would rather give up half of my paycheck and never have to worry about having third-world, stone-age survival inconveniences because greed is somehow a good thing for a country... But most people barely know the difference between socialism and communism and they associate anything which might implicate fairness and sharing as communist (I am against communism. Because it provably has never worked).