The Lost Generations

I've always assumed it was the last two centuries that confronted individuals with the most change - cars, telephones, the internet transformed the lives of people like never before, while further in the past it was just steady farming with some wars and diseases sprinkled in, right?

Reading between the lines of the history books seems to show that not only the amplitude of change (from good to bad and vice versa) must have been greater in the past; the cultural change of new rulers, new religions, unvoluntary migration must have hit harder than the mild confusion people had with exciting new tech in the recent years.