Postscript

I had a post a few weeks ago about satisfaction with life in general, specifically:  "Here is a ladder symbolic of the 'ladder of life'. Let's suppose the top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you, and the bottom represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder do you feel you personally stand at the present time?"  That showed data from 1964 to 2014, and no trend was apparent.  But since the late 1960s is sometimes seen as a turning point, that means there wasn't much information on the "before" state (only surveys from 1964 and 1966).  I found that there was an earlier example of the same question, in 1959.  The results including that survey:

Again, no sign of a trend.  The average for 1959 is pretty much in the middle, higher than the figures for 2009 and 2001, but lower than 2005, 2006, and 2014.  There is a popular (and plausible) story which holds that after growth in average incomes slowed down in the 1970s, people became more discontented, which made them less generous and more inclined to look for someone to blame, and the longer it went on, the more discontented people became, making them even less generous and more punitive.  If this is true, the only way to change the public mood is to return to faster and more broadly based economic growth, which no one has any idea how to accomplish.  So in a way, the absence of a trend in perceived position on the "ladder of life" is encouraging.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]