You would think that living in the Dark Ages, with fiefdom/serfdom, slavery, plagues, no modern medicine, routine violence and torture, puritanical religion as

You would think that living in the Dark Ages, with fiefdom/serfdom, slavery, plagues, no modern medicine, routine violence and torture, puritanical religion as standard belief system, little science or worldly information, half your children probably dying young, poor life expectancy in general, and lifetimes of hard thankless labour, sounds worse. Yet somehow we have little issue or qualm in framing modern life as "worst ever", by various metrics. It's interesting and complicated.