Anyone transported to the past would be faced with the knowledge of what they have in this current era being compared to past situations. The main thing about p

Anyone transported to the past would be faced with the knowledge of what they have in this current era being compared to past situations. The main thing about people in the 80s is that they knew that what they had in the 80s was all there was. You likely can transport someone from 2100 into 2020 and they might be incredibly frustrated with the limitations of technology, communication, friction of social interactions, and so on. As to the point of the person you're replying to, about cars and phones: Those cars will also save many more people, which depending on the side you're on can mean that you're more likely to survive now or that there's much more "competition" likely to survive now. Smartphones are better than the blackberries of a decade ago but they also shove social media down your throat in a way that had no equal before, which leads to significant impairments of mental health in younger generations. There are many ways to look at the issue and we can almost endlessly zoom in and find discrepancies, but I wouldn't be surprised if a certain version of the central limit theorem ended up applying when comparing generations: the amount of seemingly random variables added up "even out" enough that the curves all end up looking like similar distributions, which can be compared.