Humans used to have to labor all to avoid starvation. There were few choices and most of us we died in the town where we were born. Compare to today -- now, we have incredible freedom, cheap and delicious food, cheap ubiquitous entertainment, are more or less immune to the elements, and have tons of free time. But all of this freedom and plenty has forced us to make choices, and it turns out people aren't good at making choices. We struggle to not gorge ourselves on food or waste years of our lives on insipid entertainment. We would like to exercise, eat right, read books, learn things, contribute meaningfully to our areas of interest -- but most of us don't. Worse, we have no excuse for our choices because we are almost completely free.
This dynamic leads to a situation where people hate modernity. Partly because making choices is hard and partly because our freedom makes it clear that our bad choices are our own fault. And so people long for a return to un-freedom. Many of us would rather be poor and starving than to have to make choices and face our own inadequacies.
What's worse is that people know that whole ecosystems and stable climate patterns are slipping away and will likely never come back.
Because I’m really curious what you mean when you say we’re more free than ever. Free time especially is what eludes most people of my peer group; endless tv shows to stream is meaningless without free time for example.
Specific countries may be failing to improve, but if you're from the USA remember that your country is 4.25% of the world, and very few of you were ever in abject poverty in the beginning of that timeframe.
Global abject poverty as a standard is roughly "sleeping rough" in western terms (more precisely, it's 2.15 US dollars of purchasing power per day), and the number of people worldwide at that level has gone from 1930 million in 1994 to 1510 million in 2004 to 806 million in 2014 to 693 million today.
But expenses expand to fill the available budget, so the actual cost of living is higher, as people earn more to spend more to get more.
(If you wish you had more free time but don't negotiate a pay cut in return for shorter work hours, it just means you value the money more than your time.)
How do you know how good things "could be"? Just because you can imagine something doesn't mean it's possible
Continuously making good choices is really difficult, especially when we have so many incredibly alluring distractions. Having some guard rails is a good thing for almost everyone.
That is blatantly wrong. Better is always possible and the people who steal and cheat the system are the ones who deny that better world for us all.
The Hitlers, the Putins, the Kochs and Epsteins and Madoffs of the world have made the world far worse than it needs to be for the absolutely worst personal reasons.
It's not necessary to know how good things could be. Part of the meaning of life is to work towards a good you think could be, and the modern oligarchy strips us of that right.
Housing is the biggest culprit. It has gone up something like 5x in the last 20 years, while salaries have increased maybe 20%.
What people actually pay for it, though, in terms of mortgage payments as a share of income, is at basically the same level (6%) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MDSP
As long as people buy houses on credit, high house prices only reflect that mortgages are cheap.