Technology does make certain TASKS in life easier, but I'd argue that it's NOT a logical consequence that technology makes life BETTER.
Eugenicist may argue that this is not really a good thing, since it leads to a larger and larger fraction of the population having poor health, some of which will be hereditary.
1: Kaczynski’s term. Read his manifesto or even better the book Anti-Tech Revolution.
That's a pretty broad claim. How far back is "the past" that was so much better? Which people did you have in mind? The Irish peasants starving because of potato blight? European villagers during the Black Death? The slaves building pyramids in ancient Egypt?
We don't know much about miserable medieval peasants, because they as a whole didn't know how to write, and the little the rare educated one wrote is unlikely to have been preserved. We know mostly what the rich or at least decently well off of the times have left, a lot of it biased or self-aggrandizing. Some of those wrote on things that they themselves didn't experience.
When you imagine happy peasants you should question who wrote on them and why, and if in those times there was any likelihood of anybody caring about the plight of suffering people, being allowed to write about it, and it being preserved to this day.
But besides that, even with the luck of having a life with a comfortable existence with work you enjoy, you still could one day die from something like an accident with a farm animal, a bad tooth, or childbirth.