Well, it's possible that certain groups in society -- in particular, highly-educated individuals in Western societies -- have become outliers in how positively they imagine the state of the world to be. (This was Hans Rosling's conclusion, which led to the formation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapminder_Foundation ).

It's probably not going to convince you for me to pull more stats from World In Data, but according to this, people do, in general, seem to be fairly happy with their lot https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction