The vast majority of people in the past needed to work the land in order to supply the basic need for food. In modern societies, less than five percent of the population supplies the dietary requirements of the entire society. This frees up the rest of the population for productive work in a bewildering array of professions and occupations. The increase in wealth over time has also meant that many people have both the time and the money to enjoy leisure pursuits. Even if they had television and movies, professional sports, recorded music, and the Internet before this century, the average man or woman wouldn't have had the time or money to enjoy them.
Life is so much easier now.
While the daily grind may still seem like, well, a grind, it is far easier now than in the past. Spending eight or ten hours behind a desk may not seem like paradise, but most of us would find it vastly preferable to spending twelve hours behind a plow. Travel is incomparably easier and faster. We don't walk thirty miles to get to the nearest town. We don't even have to get up in the middle of the night to put coal into the furnace.