The past was not that cute

It's kind of an interesting question. What makes us inherently unhappy?

I think if the theory goes that from a evolutionary standpoint we psychologically are still better equipped to be hunter gatherers, we should assume that our feelings towards homicide and child mortality are comparable. So how happy can a people be, when 40% of their children die and another 20% die by homicide?

If we follow that thread I would argue that it's very unlikely that people were happier back when or would be happier today, unless some other component of being hunter gatherers makes us fantastically ecstatic.

What makes us unhappy are the things that the modern world takes away from us. Sense of agency, sense of community, belonging, autonomy, recognition, and many other factors. The modern day human brain and mind is still lagging far behind our current predicament. We evolved to thrive in small village cohorts that condition for small social interactions that have real impact on our lives. Here's a striking example I remember. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFOhAd3THW4 There are better longer videos of the citation from the mothers side, where she talks about how alien and cold modern day society is compared to her humble village life. No amount of medicine, material possessions or modern day creature comforts could keep her in New York. she chose to leave and come back home because that's what made her happy.

That is a beautiful anecdote, but I don't see what we could reasonably generalize from that. It's fairly well established that access to good medical care and a certain degree of wealth make us happier.

Could a life radically and willfully different in many ways turn out to be better for most of us (which is critically what you claimed before)? It's certainly possible, given how few people take this route, but an appeal to nature is just not super convincing, unless you can back it up with data.

I can't help but notice you did not engage with how 40% of kids dieing and another 20% of us getting killed by some member of the cherished tribe could possible lead to high levels of life satisfaction. As far I can tell, on the whole, the good old days were cruel and rosy retrospection is just that.

The "miserable" existence ascribed by modern day humans to past human life is colored by their modern day psychological profile. If they were born and raised at that environment their psychological profile would be very different. A modern day human can be easily traumatized by something that past humans would consider trivial. Sure death was more common, possibly even violence, but that would not mean people were less happy. Satisfaction in human psychology has a certain profile, and that profile mainly follows the things i talked about. Close human relationships in small cohort groups, perception of agency, among a few other important factors. things that are missing among many citizens of modern day societies world wide. My point is that on average if you performed a statistical analysis of how happy people were, the claim is that they were happier back then then now.

To me, 100-500x higher death rates are simply not a detail that I can get past. Since we are basically of the same genetic makeup (which is also the cornerstone of you argument) that simply seems incompatible with a better life. It's possible I am lacking vision for how it all gels into the good existence you think it does.

What I think makes this idea interesting: We are not as fantastically happy today as we should be, if progress on the tangibles translated into happiness. So there's definitely something that is off and I can totally see what you are describing being part of it.