Maybe within the last 30 years but certainly not if you count even just prior to 1970 when heavy manufacturing still provided the primary jobs.

Mill and mine jobs sucked worse than agriculture. Women had zero choice other than homemaker, teacher and secretary. Many Rust Belt men were basically functional alcoholics because life was so damn difficult. For example, a black humor joke at Bethlehem Steel was that nobody ever retired from the car shop (they manufactured railroad cars)--they died of some form of weird cancer long before that.

People complain about how badly we deal with "mental health" now but everybody had to just suck it up and effectively smoked and drank themselves stupid to deal with it in the past. And prior to World War II and the broad distribution of antibiotics, basic physical health was a crapshoot let alone mental health.

I'm not happy about IQ starting to trend down. However, IQ continuously increasing indicates that groups of people were still systematically malnourished up into the early 1990s.

I may have a bunch of problems with the way things are going, but I'm having a tough time coming up with a time when it was that much better than things are right now.

Certainly most of the people sitting here reading HN would have had a really shitty time in the 1950s and 1960s (and probably even 1970s). They've forgotten that smart people had a hard time escaping their local social area and were strongly ostracized up through even the 1980s.