The answer is that most people did not live like what you remember.

For most of the last many thousands of years most people worked very hard for very little and died young of disease and war. If you got injured or sick there was no real health care. Women had a high chance of dying in childbirth. Your kids had a high chance of dying before 10.

That stressful city life is better than how most people in history have lived.

Of course we could make it quite a bit better still. We are nowhere near an optimum. A lot of our wounds are self inflicted: addiction to constant doom scrolling, hedonic treadmill for bling, real estate hyperinflation because we refuse to build enough housing.

But that description of the past is very sugar coated and selective.