Life has always been hard; it has always depended on who and when you are/were. It might be helpful to spend some time looking into conditions of the immigrants in New York City from about 1870 to the First World War. Ken Burns has a wonderful film documentary of The City, and CD #3 has a great presentation of their plight. It is also presented graphically in Jacob Riis's "How the Other Half Lives," a collection of pictures of the tenaments on the lower East Side (it is also referenced in the Burns documentary). Those conditions were truly horrible with whole families living in one room with an outside window, families sharing a one room apartment with another family in "shifts" --- those were difficult times --- and there were other times in our history when recession/panics made live truly miserable for many people. Of course if you were rich, none of these times were difficult.
Hard times seem to be part of the economic cycle; it's just that we have come to believe that things would be ever upward and onward. A look at the history of recessions in this country (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions) might help make this clearer.
We've gotten through the others; we'll probably get through this one as well.
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