I'm going to play devil's advocate here. I know what you are saying and
in general it's hard to argue against it. However, I've personally seen an improvement in my well being at the same time as I've reduced what most people would consider my "standard of living".
I used to have a 3000 sq ft house, a car, a job I spent 3 hours a day commuting to in my car, every labour saving gadget you can think of, climate controlled everything, etc. I even drove to the laundromat frequently to pay someone to do my laundry because I was too busy to do it myself.
Now, I live in a small apartment in the country side, generally only minimally heat and do not cool my apartment (temp ranges from 5C to 35C during the year), I work from home, do not drive, eat seasonal, local food, preserve my own food, etc. Admittedly I got married and my wife does the laundry :-P. The improvement in my life is like night and day.
Like I say, I'm playing devil's advocate and I don't really imagine that everybody would be happy with my lifestyle. However, I really do think that the assumption that more insulation from the reality of nature is not necessarily a "higher standard of living". For me, especially, it's quite the opposite -- which would have been very surprising to the younger version of myself.
Even economically, the modern world is moving inexorably towards a place where "labour" refers to mental labour, not physical labour. For people who frequent HN, I think it's kind of assumed that this all right and proper. However, when I was teaching English in the rural high school in Japan where I now live, most of my students wanted to be fishermen or farmers. But they know that this is the way to eternal poverty. You can't realistically make a living doing that kind of thing. They end up working unhappily in a factory.
As we've fuelled the increased standard of living by reducing prices for necessities, we've created a world where everything needs to be a massive enterprise with high volumes and super low margins. Even the other day I was joking with my wife that I will quit my current job as a programmer and open a shop making artisanal cheese. "How many cheeses do you think you'll have to make in a year?", she asked. "Only about 20,000 I think" was my reply. Again, in my rural Japanese town, only 20 years ago you would have found a tofu maker, a miso maker, a sake brewery, 4 or 5 fruit and veg stores all drawing from the produce of the local area. And while the JA (national food distributor) is great about prioritising local food distribution, gone are the days where you can set up a shop or produce a product for just your local area.
It's the ubiquitous cheap energy that enables this increase in scale. It expands deliverability (I can mail order low temp pasturised milk from 3 prefectures over and have it delivered in a refrigerated truck o_O). It allows super efficient, mega scale operations from far away to under cut local, high labour intensive operations and reduces prices. In may ways it's amazing.
But, I'm not sure "increased standard of living" is actually the best term for it.