The historic demands of life were always sufficient to require deliberate effort and accurate aim, and while a contingent of people always failed to lock into and achieve lasting happiness, these were always a small minority that tended not to be the ones who successfully reproduced and raised the next generation.
Modern life provides even greater challenges compared to historic periods due to the complexity fueled by cheap energy and the innovations it fostered, along with unprecedented wealth and health that has removed most of the consequences for poor attitudes and choices.
While modern wealth far exceeds anything known by prior generations, but wealth is no substitute for meaning. Growing wealth has brought with it growing entropy that has overtaken the adoption rate and strength of the beliefs that worked before but have declined steadily since WWII. Because joy comes from meaningful progress in a worthwhile goal, should it be a surprise that increasing numbers of people are devoid of it, given the increasing cohort of those completely overcome by the challenges of life?
A principle component of what is different today is the sheer amount of information instantly available for nearly no cost. Ambient awareness is much greater today than in the past. Thanks to a flood of information, people today are much more aware of the serious challenges of reality compared to those who came before, but have far fewer and weaker tools than prior generations. Modern life is a combination of greater-than-historic awareness and near total abandonment of practices that proved sufficient to cope with historic awareness.
The more awareness you acquire, the stronger your tools must be for contending with complexity. You have to become better at critical thinking, yet people today are markedly worse than prior generations. You have to become faster at adapting to change, yet people today are still following paths that have not led to success since before the financial crisis of 2008. You have to be more willing to sacrifice for the future, yet people today are arguably worse at this than any prior people. You have to be robust to quickly notice and recover from bad decisions inevitable in higher complexity, but today’s youth are more ideological and fragile than any surviving society has ever been.