Just my opinion, but I think life is better now than it was when I was a teenager in the 80's. I think a lot of you have forgotten how mind-crushingly boring your teenage years were.
I was a teenager in the 90's and don't remember it being particularly boring. There was plenty of TV & movies, video games, teenage shenanigans, school clubs, etc. I suppose video games had kind of a golden age in the 90's with the 4th (SNES) and 5th (PS1, N64) console generations, and PC games like Doom, Quake, Blizzard's first games in their franchises, etc. On second thought without all that I would have been a lot more bored.
Maybe it was more boring, not sure, but at least all the stupid stuff I did at the time wasn't documented on the internet. I don't know how I'd handle that.
I think the nuance that is lost is that the "better" is not uniform. The previous world worked better for some people, the current one works better for others. It is probably a net gain on the whole, but the dispersion of results might be stronger than the underlying trend.
Averages are what make comparisons hard - there is a lot of variation within the averages. Truckers in the U.S., for example, were way better off in 1970 than they are today (in relative terms). But an average factory worker in China was way worse off.