I think it’s more like, we had an era where we conflated things like independence, security, knowledge, and diversity with prosperity, and now we are seeing signs that those things were marketing slogans. Thus the new era looks bleak.

There is no evidence, at least not for such a general claim. Each human has a wildly different experience. For many of us, we never left this era. For others, we have been out of it X years. Etc.