None of what you are saying is supportable by any data or statistics.
The boomers had everything worse. When they were born, something like two thirds of them had indoor plumbing. And a third of them did not.
My parents, my grandparents, they grew up the same way everybody else did back then. They worked on a farm from the age of like 5 doing manual labor.
When you are talking about your parents, you are talking about the luckiest people in the country. Nobody got a pension back then. Maybe if you worked for IBM, but that was not the norm.
What you are saying, "every plausible life-path got downgraded a couple notches since then" is completely false. Every plausible life-path has been upgraded since then, the things you are saying just aren't true.