I mean, in the pre-industrial days a local ruler can just pull your ass off a farm and throw you onto a battlefield. More often than not you were left to craft your own weapons; you were a part of a meat wall to soak up the arrows before the armored knights rode in to clean things up. That's if the army didn't just march onto your field and take everything. If not both.
Up until the 19th century, slavery was legal in most of the world. Also, unless you were a white man, you were either effectively or literally disenfranchised. During the Industrial Revolution, children were put to work in mines and factories and died grisly deaths.
The 20th century was essentially one giant century-long conflict that killed hundreds of millions, from Europeans getting diseases and chemical weapon attacks and non-stop artillery strikes in muddy trenches, to scorched-earth battlefields of Stalingrad (where the fighting was so intense it often took place room-to-room) and Okinawa (where you'd share a muggy foxhole with the overwhelming stench of your buddies' maggot-riddled corpses). Famine swept through most of the world soon after, and the fighting moved on to civil wars in Africa and proxy wars in Asia and South America.
A lot of the perspective needs to be re-aligned with the fact that "better times" only existed for the privileged. If you were non-white, poor, homosexual, disabled, female, non-Christian, or FSM forbid any combination thereof, you were largely cut out of the "better times" and generally powerless -- both as a citizen and as a victim of crime. Environmentalism as an idea is quite new, we're largely disease-free, crime is way down, and famine is greatly reduced. Many of the problems you worry about today were practically endemic to our ancestors -- horrible ways to die, to be sure, but problems they literally had no answers for.
The most demoralizing thing about right now is that we're about to tear apart all the hard-won gains due to stupidity. But in this regard the cynics are just as much of a problem as the perpetrators. Cynicism is toxic and counterproductive; it requires a mindset that what you feel you're about to lose is "normal" as opposed to things our ancestors never enjoyed and had to fight like hell for. It's taking those gains for granted and just giving them up because that's easier than confronting the fact that the privileged aren't going down without trying to take it all with them.
