This is more or less the point of Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto. Technology is essentially evil as it replaces the things that truly connect man to his nature. That technology has had a destabilizing effect on society, has made life unfulfilling, and has caused widespread psychological suffering. Most everything we do now is a “surrogate” activity” to try and get control/power over ourselves and find meaning, which has been vaporized by technological progress.

In particular the Industrial Revolution but he himself sees an ideal world basically void of technology. That the revolution should strive to destabilize industrial society enough to force its collapse.

I think he has many interesting observations that are really worth exploring. He also predicted a lot of things more or less. But end of the day life is what you make of it. You don’t really have to participate in modern society. And people have always had existential problems and a desire to find meaning, even if they had less time to ponder it (and possibly be antagonized by it) because they were tending a field, etc. They probably had a long time to think about it as an infection slowly ate its way through their body causing immeasurable pain over days or weeks.

By certain angles it is even less important than spiritual, community and philosophical purpose. It's not something that you can measure directly but by many possible proxies (Amish levels of depression, the Roseto effect, various studies on happiness of underdeveloped countries), people need very few material things to be happy. Perhaps it is a kind of mass delusion or confirmation bias that happiness must correlate linearly, or even logarithmically, with disposable income.