That's subjective. People have lived in much simpler ways than we do now and been as happy – or more so, modern rates of depression are pretty high and highest in first world countries.
See, people say that, but there's basically no heuristic you can actually use where it's not better closer to the present, on the net and usually for specific individuals, too. Un/under developed land or somethin' would be close to it, but on a personal level that's questionable -- even if more existed on the whole, the ability to
experience it was less, by sheer dint of available transportation and safety measures. You'd be closer with low population density or whathaveyou, but it's
still possible to live out in some empty non-place, and you're in a hell of a lot better position to survive it. Maybe pervasiveness of bigotry or xenophobia, or monoculturalism, racial homogeneity, whatever, but hell, you can still go find communities where that's ubiquitous and live there, too, and finding an alternative if you get tired of it is quite a lot less trouble.
Even the modern depression rate thing is a red herring; we're physically incapable of knowing what the historical rates
were, so if it's actually worse, or if there was some other unusually prevalent mental disorder, is functionally a complete unknown. We can make
guesses, and track changes since we've started collecting the applicable information to an extent it's worth a damn, but the infrastructure and capability for tracking pre-modern mental disorders literally didn't exist at the time, and we don't have time machines to apply ours to the past, just left overs of the time we give our best at figuring out. And the symptoms certainly existed, prevalent enough they can be seen in historical documents and whatnot.
Meanwhile, take your pick.
Any pick. Everything verifiable loses out, every level of medicine, every level of infrastructure, transport, communication, material goods, capability to find and interact with immaterial ones, whatever you care to care about, you're better off in modern times.* Everything
not -- stuff like the mentioned societal incidence of depression -- the best we can manage is either inconclusive, or pointing strongly to things being better in the present by one measure or another, if only in capability to actually measure the issue. We either still have it, whatever it is, got rid of it if negative, or we've improved on it. There is
vanishingly few areas where that's not true, to the point I can't actually think of any off the top of my head that isn't functionally writing fiction when describing the state of things in the past, save maybe the state of environmental degradation (and hell, with that, we're still better able to actually
do something about degrading environments, even if we don't particularly choose to). It was easier to die, be permanently crippled, or otherwise have your life ruined. That's about it.
If it's subjective, then it was worse on every subjective level
anyway and the difference is pretty much irrelevant. You could live back then and be happy, sure. People can be happy in a lot of situations. That doesn't mean those times weren't shit, or at the absolute least shittier.
*Which isn't to say things can't get bad, or that individual nightmares in the present can't match those of the past, or some nonsense like that, but the chances are less, capability to avoid more, and so on into nausea, in almost every incidence under the sun, even in the worst parts of the present world. The closest to having it worse these days is we're actually more capable of
noticing all the nasty crap that happens, rather than it happening and no one finding out until an archaeologist digs up your bones a few hundred years later.
