That is true, but understandably, people are not thrilled about the prospect of their conditions being worse than those their predecessors experienced.
Especially not if, at the same time, they experience an uninterrupted period of economic growth and ever growing profit margins for the corporations they work for.
We are living in the best of times as measured by infant mortality, lifespans, literacy, poverty, and technology.
Psychologically, people seem to experience less hope and optimism that the future will be better. That is an important concept as well - regardless of whether you think people are delusional - their subjective perceptions still matter.
The ones who get to complain are the "Peters" whose futures were stolen so their parents could live high on the hog, no?
it's better in terms of people not having to do brutal physical labor.
but it's worse it's ever been in terms of mental labor and mental health. For older folks they may not understand, and we as a society as a whole not understand, how much mental impact growing up with social media and endless amounts of stimulation has an affect on the entire generation. Social media is still incredibly new only several decades old, with every year getting more and more stimulating. We have no idea the consequences of such over a long term impact on mental health.
You may think "just don't go on it" but it's a whole different story for younger kids, when everyone in your peer group is on social media. If your entire social network is dependent on social media, "just don't use social media" becomes incredibly difficult, and you become exposed to algorithms designed to ceaselessly deliver dopamine to your brain.
On top of that work, has become a lot more and more mentally draining vs physically draining, making it way harder to factor how tiring it is. As someone who studied Neuroscience in undergrad, the biggest takeaway for me learning it was Neuroscience is still an extremely new science, and our understanding of the brain is very very limited, funnily enough despite how much advancements we made with ai. So understanding people's mental exhaustion is very difficult to measure.
Endless mental dopamine delivery, combined with rapid technological pace requiring younger individuals to learn more and more, faster and faster,
I argue, that "times are not as good" as people think they say. There is a different kind of pain involved from working long hours in more natural/stable but physically arduous tasks in the fields or whatnot, vs 8 hours in some confined space indoors of having to constantly learn something new of an ever-changing landscape of new technology without stability where you can be rendered useless in a span of a couple years (ie artists and ai image generation). The pain of being in some confined space is not new to the older generation, but it certainly is getting worse because of how faster automation is rendering certain knowledge and jobs useless much faster than it ever did.
Social media may cause some problems but it won't leave me with a slipped vertebrae from bending over pulling weeds all day.
I think this is a bit of a rose-colored rear-view mirror, and to the extent it's true it's a pretty brief period of time historically. Most people in most times had to work pretty hard. If you were a farmer, you worked pretty much all the daylight hours every day. Immigrants in the early part of the 20th century worked very hard, often the man running a small business or doing factory work and the woman cleaning, sewing, cooking, bookkeeping, etc. for hire. And all of that is when the men weren't off fighting a war as a conscripted soldier.
The "working man" who could support a family on his income alone was a product of the post-WWII economy. And he didn't really have to save for retirement, he had a defined-benefit pension (the kind that bankrupted many of their employers in subsequent years).
The fact that today, people can feel pretty picky about the terms of the work they do is a sign that times are pretty good, despite what people may think and say.