I am not glossing over things. Nobody would want to live in the world like 100 years ago or even way before in time. We are just acting as spoiled brats.
Very active, very interesting times: lots of scientific breakthrough, development of recent theories, lots of experimentations, while a great part of science is still, and for the last time in history, rather accessible. Travel to the whole world is possible, if you can afford it, while exploration is still possible and a few discoveries are to be made.
Railway transportation everywhere in the most remote places, like mine. 3 times as many people and 10 times as many shops as now in such places. Not everyone packed in gigantic conurbations with abandoned places elsewhere.
Education, hygiene, medicine already pretty developed (not as much as now, and not as well spread, but much closer to now than to the middle ages).
Technical knowledge and devices available (or very soon to be) to ease hardest works.
Great times if you were wealthy. Shitty times if you were a miner, or one of many factory workers, or a peasant in the wrong place. Quite okay times otherwise.
In 1924 the son of the president of USA died because he played tennis without socks: "On 30 June 1924, Coolidge’s two sons, John and Calvin Jr., set out to play tennis on the White House tennis court. 16-year-old Calvin Jr., in a hurry to get out on the court, donned tennis shoes but no socks. Young Calvin’s sockless exertions raised a blister on one of his toes, which soon became infected. The modern antibiotics that would quickly clear up such an infection today did not exist in 1924, and by the time White House physicians were summoned to treat Calvin Jr., it was too late: he died of pathogenic blood poisoning a week later."
I know plenty of people who would rather live as we did back in the 1950s than as we live today. I happen to disagree, but there is a growing pervasive sense that society (at least the US) peaked decades ago, and our best days are solidly behind us.
