When I was young

 In 1951, the Gallup Poll asked "Comparing your present family circumstances with those when you were a child, would you say you are better off, or worse off, than your parents were then?"  They asked it again in 1991, and other organizations asked it in 1994 (twice) and 2016.  The results:

                    better      worse    same (vol.)
Feb 1951       60%         24%      14%
Dec 1991      78%         12%        9%
Aug 1994      65%        22%      11%
Sep  1994      72%        21%        6%
Dec  2016      72%        20%        7%

The distributions are all about the same except for 1991, when people were more positive.  I can't think of a plausible reason that opinions would change that much between December 1991 and 1994 (economic conditions were similar, but somewhat better in 1994), so I think that difference is at least partly sampling error.  The important point is that opinions weren't more pessimistic in 2016 than in 1950 or 1994.  It's often suggested that Americans always felt like they were making economic progress from generation to generation until recently, and that the loss of that sense has led to a variety of social and political problems, like "deaths of despair," the decline in rates of marriage and childbearing, and the rise of Trump.  But I don't think that's the case--people are discontented with some aspects of society, but most still believe that there's an upward trend in their standard of living.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]