It takes me back to when I read the Unabomber manifesto online as a teenager when it was first printed. I largely rejected it, but there was this part of me that resonated with the emotional appeal to a simple world with simple ideals and a connection to nature. I knew enough to realize that this was a fantasy, but it's an appealing fantasy that also finds expression in the popularity of comic books, pseudo-medieval fantasy epics, and other forms of escapist fiction.
I think what it boils down to is that we are not neurologically wired for abundance, huge scale societies, or the types of labor that pay the best in the modern world. We're not built to sit in front of screens and solve puzzles all day, and without something to struggle against parts of our emotional nature seem to go haywire. I've speculated that the immense paranoia and prevalence of all kinds of neuroses might be an emotional analogue to the hygiene hypothesis for allergies. Without real traumas and existential struggles, our emotional system starts attaching the coping mechanisms that exists for these things to other more mundane aspects of existence like politics and relationships.