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Notes -
If you ask those questions of me personally, the answer for most of them is "yes", based not just on what my understanding (through reading the occasional old text) of medieval peasants but also just comparing myself to members of my parent generation who have still inherited an older work ethic, scarcity-oriented life philosophy et cetera. For the general population, I'm not sure, but I'm not convinced that these are the right questions to ask either - is self-report actually the end-all measure of utility, or could we look at two equally happy people and say that the happiness of one of the two is actually more legitimate?
More importantly, even if we find no difference between the peasant and the modern youth in all of those criteria (or even a difference favouring the peasant), symmetry remains broken in the other direction in that scarcely a modern youth would be happy to trade places based on a description of the medieval life but almost any medieval peasant would be based on a description of the modern one. In fact, we can surmise (based on experience in the Cold War and social inequality within modern countries) that the mere presence of those who live the modern template causes any zeal, excitement and eudaimonia of those who live a life of back-breaking work to feed themselves to evaporate.
Considering that, doesn't it seem facile that theories such as the parent poster's always single out a form of society that just happens to align with their aesthetic preferences as the one that actually makes people happier? Communists also have a good case that the life of occasional deprivation and abuse under a planned economy - especially coupled with the occasional drives for purpose such as a push for space colonisation - would have been superior to our abundant anomie, and that the people living under it were merely rendered unhappy because the Capitalist West gratuitously flexed its abundance in their faces. In fact, in this way, perhaps the West is really to blame for the unhappiness of serfs anywhere, be they communist, feudalist, or the underclass in a capitalist society! Following down that train of thought may lead you to a very socialist place.
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