I'll take present day living over any single point in the past. Antibiotics weren't even produced until the 1940s, and before that time a scraped knee could literally kill you.

In the cold war people built concrete bunkers in their basement for fear of a nuclear Armageddon.

In Rome, if you couldn't pay your taxes you were forced to sell your children into slavery.

And here we are, where past presidents are buying ocean-front property so clearly the elites aren't truly as concerned about it as they publicly state.