Thomas Paine posited that if a man, unencumbered by society, could meet his basic needs (food, shelter, etc) in x hours of work per day, then society owed that same person the same basic standards of life for working that same x hours per day. Where I'm from, the Native Americans had to work about 2 hours a day to meet their needs, and so became really great artisans with their "free" time.

Closer to present, my parents were able to buy a comfortable suburban home while working relatively low paying government jobs. That includes my mom taking off approx 6 years to take care of my sister and I until we started elementary school.

When Europeans first came to America, there were schools of cod off the coast that you could literally dangle an empty hook into the water and catch fish. Passenger Pigeons darkend the sky for days on end with their migrations, and the thundering of huge buffalo herds could be heard and seen throughout a good portion of the continent.

[Life expectancy] fell to 77 in 2020 and dropped further, to just over 76, in 2021. That's the largest decrease over a two-year span since the 1920s. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-life-expectancy-in-the-us-is-falling-202210202835

Sure it's not all bad. But it's far, far from all good as well. Sometimes bitching is just the sign of an unhappy person, but often there are some real truths behind the complaints.

Yeah, but as the quality of life has improved, we have also improved our knowledge and technology to the point where everyone can live a comfortable, generally healthy life, without want for any necessities. But that isn't happening because of human greed and indifference. And everyone is completely justified complaining about that.

I think it's more that as qol improved so too did the ability of common people to record their frustrations

Nowadays we have first world problems, but I wonder if something comparable existed 500 years ago. Maybe city problems?

Oh no, they didn’t have salmon at the fish market, so I had to buy perch instead.

I mean, by 1400 the world population was comparable to the modern US. It merely broke the billion people mark by the early 1800s, it took merely another century to double that, and it since did more than 4x straight to 8.2 billion people, so even if the proportion of whiners stayed the same, there'd be so many more of them. Now, to that, consider we now have access to the internet.

Most people who have had a thing don’t like losing it and it's slipping.

Not to mention, that "quality" is really subjective based on location.

what fucking quality of life is it if I have a phone that sucks ass, and no house to call my own?

EDIT : phones in general suck ass, I'm not saying my phone is worse than someone elses. That's part of the problem that they're all "pictures under glass" unwieldy, fiddly pieces of shit