When topics like this come up, it helps to look at the big picture:
When our species (homo sapiens) first emerged in Eastern Africa some 250,000 to 300,000 years ago, we were hunter gatherers who lived from meal to meal, day to day. Violence and threats were common. Once food and safety were secured, there was time for leisure, but not much to do in comparison to our times today.
Hundreds of thousands of years passed as we traveled around the globe and wiped out or absorbed fellow humanoid species like the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Then, beginning around 12,000 years ago, we gradually developed the first agricultural empires in places like the Middle East, Eastern Europe, China, and Central and South America (that's when "analog" life began, when we used fire, agriculture, animal domesticity, and permanent shelters to mimic and control to some extent nature's processes). Life was hard and brutish for most people, disease was common, many newborns died in infancy. Authoritarian leaders were the norm.
Over thousands of years, agriculturally based societies developed enough stable stratification to support social classes built upon the backs of grueling farm labor, including merchants, artisans, the clergy, and small groups of intellectuals, all of whom served at the varying whims of the ruling class. From these minority groups advanced technological progress, until the emergence of the second phase of the "analog" process: The industrial revolution, beginning in Great Britain during the mid-1700s. Life for the typical person and family was hard, disease and wars were common, including on the American frontier.
Next came the emergence of "advanced economies" during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, built upon the remnants of slave & indentured labor. As millions moved from farms across the northern hemisphere into crowded cities, pollution and disease were rampant, eventually ameliorated by public health advances like hygiene and the first vaccines. Working days (whether back on the farm or in the cities) were long and difficult; typically 6 days of 10-12 hour shifts a week. Child labor was common, as were unsafe working conditions. Economic inequality was extreme. Wars of conquest and empire expansion continued apace, with indigenous peoples overwhelmed by rapacious desire and foreign disease, as in earlier times. Life became comfortable for the upper classes, who used every means to keep wealth in the family.
Then the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. Humanity nearly extinguished itself, along with most every other living thing on the planet as the nuclear age erupted. Tens of millions were brutally killed or injured, hundreds of cities leveled. From the ashes emerged the first empire to decide not to systematically oppress the fallen: The United States of America. Instead, while engaging in a global battle for hearts and minds against the totalitarian Soviet Union regime (and to a much lesser extent, Red China), the U.S. finally confronted to an extent its own demons (slavery, the native American genocide, and other forms of minority exclusion), constructing upon a shattered world an unparalleled economic and military network across the globe.
And so, for a brief sliver of time (1945 to 1970) the U.S. achieved an unprecedented level of prosperity for the average child and family as other nations rebuilt from war, leaving the U.S. as the world's financial guarantor and chief consumer. For the first time, beginning in the late 40s and early 50s, home ownership as a means of wealth creation became a common feature of American life. An increased emphasis on education and public health enabled the typical American family to live comfortably on one member's income, while leisure life exploded with options. With the catalyst of the G.I. Bill and overflowing state coffers, higher education became a thing for the middle class, including females.
Then, beginning with the oil shocks of the early 70s and increased competition from foreign nations, America's dominant industrial base suffered its first declines as inflation increased and jobs became less plentiful. The "Knowledge Economy" began to supplant the physical as services jobs became more plentiful than industrial. Soon to follow during the 80s were the births of the so-called "digital age" (beginning with the personal home computer, then the rudiments of the internet), and the realization (beginning with James Hanson's testifying before Congress in 1988) that our planet was dangerously overheating by our own doing (a coincidence, these twin developments?).
In retrospect, the 90s and early 2000s can be seen as the last hurrah of America's unquestioned global economic and political dominance. First its misguided military adventures in the wake of 9-11, then its mortgage crisis that spread around the globe in 2008, eroded confidence in America Inc. Then came the smartphone and social media revolutions (as the digital era blossomed) that arrived in the early 2010s, which led to marked face-to-face disconnection between humans, and continued disconnection between humans and their natural world. Then came the severely disrupting effects of Covid-19, and here we are, with the most corrupt leader in America's history leading the great economic and political empire in human history.
Looking back, it can be seen that, for the vast majority of humanity who have lived over the past 300,000 years or so, life has been quite challenging. The very pinnacle of human leisure experience has been that enjoyed by much of (white) America between 1945 and 1970 -about 0.0001% of the collective human journey. For the past 80 years or so, however, life expectancy and comfort has increased substantially around the globe, made possible in part by American leadership that has resulted in an unprecedented period of overall peace and mutually beneficial alliances. Now, with an American leader who is determined to destroy those alliances in a return to 19th-style authoritarianism while environmental degradation and digital disconnection accelerate, humanity is confronting multiple crises. What will happen? That is up to us, as a people.