I tend to agree with the fact that everyone is living better now than they lived in the past, but I can easily argue against it, coming from the Soviet Union, wars, corruption, violence and darkness. There are so many variables in there. If we’re purely talking about possessions, accessibility to thing, health conditions, wars - sure. But are we living better lives? You can’t be unhappy about things you don’t know exist, so we can say people back when in time probably weren’t upset about not having useless things they didn’t know could even exist. What they had was honor, respect, reputation, sharing what they have, dark humor, love, less miserable lives since the dangers of the times would impose. In the past life would throw challenges and problems for us to solve, now we have to create challenges and problems to solve and since not all are equipped to do so, or have the discipline, we have become Nihilistic, cynical, absolutely miserable to a point of societal mass mental hysteria.