I almost always have the sense people think about the past as something beautiful and better than the present.
In my opinion this is simply incorrect. All the problems we have now, are not new. I believe we are living the best era of humanity right now (today we are better than yesterday but worse than tomorrow), we have more peace than any other time in history. We have, as @taskmaster4450 always says more abundance than ever before (well, he talks the abundance will come thanks to crypto, what I mean is with or without crypto poverty around the world is being reduced, except in Venezuela ejem...)
So, in my opinion slowly but surely we are getting better and better people, in our values and in the way we live.
Yes, we have problems, but we have always had them. We will get rid of them in time. Technology will help us.
Our future will probably be incredible.
Great point, we are at a point where we have more abundance and peace. One thing we have more of than ever is distraction though. We aren't, at least on a mass scale, all contributing in helpful ways. We are more consumers than producers, and we can't consume forever. A few problems are worse than ever, such as population size, pollution, deforestation, desertification, and species dying off.
While I do agree our future will be bright, we still need to get past a few issues and get better at working together to implement new technologies.