> This has been proven wrong again and again

[does not offer evidence]

> Yet, I can assure you ... they were much more satisfied with life than the vast majority of working class and unhoused americans today

How do you know this? How is this convincing to this audience?

> no amount of material wealth can compensate for severe mental illness

Are you asserting that mental illness occurred at lower rates in the past?

> I am certain you will be shocked at their extreme poverty and general hopefulness

There is no shortage of writing from the Great Depression expressing great hopelessness. The generation was popularly called the Lost Generation for decades by writers of the time.

We cannot conclusively know the overall happiness level of humanity at any time before the Industrial Revolution. But we can use general proxies, such as starvation rates, violent deaths, and child mortality. Those metrics have, by all knowable measures, improved by an order of magnitude after the Industrial Revolution when compared to all previous history.