How do you financially survive in California?

The only thing you are doing wrong is living in the wrong state, even Illinois is better than California (and that's not something you hear every day!)

letting your spouse not work for starters haha. You need to cut where you can. Do you really need a car? Could you take the bus everyday? Could you cut down your cell phone service? Should you downgrade your apartment. You cannot continually survive like this, you need to make a change.

Move to an area of OC that is not, $1250 a month for a studio, such as Hawaiian Gardens, Stanton, Buena Park, etc Or areas close to OC that are less expensive = Bellflower, Norwalk, etc
Your non-working spouse becomes a working spouse.
Reduce the costs of your cell phone service.
Utilize food banks - OC has a decent sized second harvest programs so fruits and veggies are available. Grace Church (?? not sure if that's the name) in La Mirada got 5000 avocados last week. What a steal!

The non working spouse needs to start working.

Non-working spouse is the problem.

54000 is a lot. You need to live somewhere cheaper. 200 per month for the cell is too much. We pay 35 for 2. Budget better. How much do you spend on Starbucks and the such

Get wife to work too...

What is your food, gas, clothing, and entertainment budget?

Otherwise
54,000 a year is 4,500 a month

I ran your numbers getting paid monthly, taking the 2 exemptions filing married federally and same for the state at paycheck calculator and got a net check of $3,625.13

Rent is 1,250
Medical ins 400
Cell Phone at 200
Power at 50
Car Insurance 100
Internet 30
Otherwise you list

On a net income of about $3,625 a month you list
2,030 in expenses.
Where is the other 1,595 going every month?

I assume some of it goes to food, gas, clothes, entertainment and your student loans but we can't tell you where to cut your expenses because you still have almost $1,600 a month unaccounted for.

What you are doing wrong is living in OC. You can't afford to live there, so you need to move somewhere cheaper.

you probably need to find cheaper digs if possible, the possibility of the wife working is a big consideration
there are lots of people surviving on the $54K income, that's actually pretty good

Non working spouse needs a job.

Cell phone bill needs to be negotiated down to the bare minimum.

Literally anything you don't NEED to spend money on needs to be stopped for a while (netflix, game subscriptions, coffee at Starbucks, etc, I don't know what applies to your life, these are examples of things people seem unwilling to give up when they have to).

And if you can, find things to sell online.

Your spouse needs to work.

$200/mo for cellphones is one wrong choice. Buy a couple of tracfones for $10/mo. Scrub your spending down to the bone and see if your spouse can get a job. More income would help a lot.