Re: ye olden times... long story short, you probably would have been even more miserable, assuming you lived this long. Or survived childbirth. And in any case, your future would be toil and more misery followed by an early death, more likely than not. Your small pleasures would be (maybe) sex and (almost certainly) alcohol, but both would be small highs leading to greater spikes of misery (child raising, liver disease).
You probably would have been more active, but likely not in anything approaching wholesome or rewarding. Menial labor in a hope to scrabble by and fuck enough for the next generation to get out and maybe not have it as poorly. Just how bad it got would depend on how far back you go, but as a general rule... we're a lot better off these days, in many, many ways. You'd have to go
way back (pre-agriculture) before you hit what we think was pretty decent, and even then you'd be lucky to survive 'till thirty or so, and likely to die of something horrible at a fairly young age.
My sad usually comes from thinking off all that and how bad off we still are. Thanks, thought-tangent
Still, better somewhat more down than starting to slide toward glorifying the shitty, shitty past.
And Hans, sympathy. Wish I could offer advice, but other than trying to find the root environmental causes (which you might not be materially or legally able to fix at the moment) not sure what you can do. Try to find and treat causes, though, not symptoms. Alcohol et al just covers up the latter, for a short period of time. Doesn't actually help, just pushes the symptoms away for a little while.
Though actually being able to do something about it's always a problem. Gods fucking know I wish I knew a reliable way to get out of this hellhole of a town and get a little existential security (somewhat better guarantee of not starving to death in a ditch, homeless)
without shoving half my waking life up some corporation's rotting asshole
and without having to resort to something that'd leave my spine a twisted mess before I'm forty, but... still working on that. Buggery hell, I really do hate this country. Most of the modern world, really. Problem being most everything else is (has been) even worse off. Gods damn this species, bleh.