The scientists and engineers that work insane hours at SpaceX are probably looking for something like that.
But in the past, for most people, life was merely a struggle to survive, that they lost sooner rather than later.
It's really hard to say what's "better" in any sort of objective and quantifiable way; but it seems to me that by making the basics of life very easy we've sort of lost something along the way.
After all, playing a game that's so easy that it doesn't provide any challenge isn't much fun either, right?
No, it doesn't, this is just one of those banal transcendental platitudes that gets repeated enough to where it sounds like it's some sort of objective truth. Like the one about how "life only has meaning because it is short and ephemeral". By that logic an aborted fetus has had the richest life of all.
Life's meaning is ultimately in the eyes of the beholder. We all derive meaning differently, there is no universal solvent.
There is a very good reason why people want to go from poor countries to rich and not the other way around. Poverty is not fun.