Prior to that, you had WW2, the Depression, WW1, slums and brutal industrial factory jobs and before that mostly subsistence farming. The idea that life today is so precarious and difficult is absurd. We just aren’t used to difficulty.
This is it absolutely. We can’t even fully understand how easy our lives are. I’m an adult with mouths to feed, yet both my wife and I barely know how to cook. And that’s only our biggest problem assuming we have access to food. We certainly have no clue how to procure food outside of retail.
This is part of what worries me for my kids. It’s been so easy, the equilibrium is more difficult. As we know from covid, weather events, etc our whole way of life is a fragile house of cards.
We are still at risk of nuclear destruction. Not only are the old weapons still around but we are making new ones for some crazy reason. (Check the Doomsday Clock, I'm not the only person who has noticed that atomic war is still threatening this planet.)
You have to take the long view: For approximately a million years we lived in very stable societies (as judged by the artifacts and art left behind.) In fact the people of Sentinel Island and some other places still live this way.
Very recently, since roughly 10k to 15k ago, we started doing agriculture and cities. Since then things have been rough: wars, famines, societies collapsing, etc.
Despite that, in the last 400-500 years, we have developed science and technology, which has increased and accelerated civilization but not stabilized it.
Now of course some people have had it pretty good for, say, the last century or so (I date it from the ready availability of hot and cold running water in the tub. If you can take a hot bath you're ahead of the game, IMO.)
And that's great! And more and more people are getting in on that, which is also great!
But if you want to say, as you did, that "Pretty much every single generation other than your parents (assuming you’re 25-40) had a tougher time and lived in a world with a more uncertain future. Every generation, going back millions of years." that's wrong. It's only going back a few thousands of years, at most, and then only for a small fraction of the people on Earth.
That's before the problem that luxury the few are enjoying is bought at the cost of the life or our whole planet! Is it really so great after all if some people get to live well for a generation or two but then everybody (that survives) has to live in post-apocalyptic hell?
Sentinel Island will be destroyed by the rising ocean in a few decades or so. The folks that have lived there for some 40,000 years will die or be forced to migrate. That's on us, not them.
See: "According to Sahlins, ethnographic data indicated that hunter-gatherers worked far fewer hours and enjoyed more leisure than typical members of industrial society, and they still ate well."
Citation: "Notes on the Original Affluent Society", Man the Hunter. R.B. Lee and I. DeVore (New York: Aldine Publishing Company) pp. 85–89. Published in 1966.
The average life expectancy in Africa today, the poorest continent, is over 60.
The average life expectancy of hunter gatherers was about 30, give or take 5 years.
For instance, my understanding is that life expectancy at age 5 in both Africa and the UK are approximately equal.
Right, because of basic modern medical care, which hunter gatherers don't have, often dying of problems with their teeth in their 20s, untreated infections, etc.
And that's only one of a deluge of reasons as to why hunter gatherer life was much more difficult than modern life, even modern life in relatively poor countries.
We can have a debate about whether life is easier in current South Sudan versus prehistory hunter gatherer tribes. Beyond that there's no debate to be had.
I'm just pointing out that the metric you used is pretty deceptive, like the average life expectancy for Romans was mid-30's, but that definitely wasn't the modal age of death (that would have been 0).
I think it's clear though that the ordering of QoL goes roughly:
Wealthy City/Farm > Hunter-Gatherer > Poor City/Farm
So for about a million years most people had it pretty good, then for about ten thousand years most people had it pretty bad, and then the last hundred years or so many people have gone from bad to good conditions, but many still endure pretty bad conditions.
If we could somehow compare the subjective quality of life of the people of Sentinel Island and the people of Manhattan Island I suspect that the least happy Sentinelese folks would be happier than the least happy New Yorkers.
The other comments here are all making absolutist claims - "I can name a circumstance in all human history that was worse therefore your claim is wrong." But that's of course not how humans make decisions - they make decisions based off of what they know and have experienced. The situation in the US today does not lead people to have children in the same rates as the baby boom generation - and that's the difference between positive and negative growth.
Yes, the cold war never ended. Yes, people have largely forgotten about it. Yes, any minute misunderstanding could really blossom into WWIII or worse, still. The fall of the USSR helped US society forget the anxieties of cold war. The cold war also existed in a universe of possibilities allowing for growth the US is unlikely to see again. There were big governmental projects in the recent past (to the cold war) that made whole industries and even cities (see: Las Vegas) possible and flourish where they weren't before those big governmental projects.
The voracity with which they attacked my idea and the exact nature of their attacks shows the cynicism I mentioned in my original comment above. Granted, HN is only a website. But I certainly don't expect every post to be just some bot looking to spread cynicism. People have actually internalized and decided to spread and act upon cynicism.
AFAIK in recent years it's only moving forward because of other man-made calamities (eg. climate change), not because of atomic war.