Again, the answer you get out of the exercise of delineating "financial periods" depends a lot on how you choose to define them. I'd say for example that good candidates for "previous financial periods" could be pre-covid, pre-2008, pre-dotcom, pre-neoliberalism, or pre-ww2. Some political commentators may prefer to use presidential administration changeovers to make their various points. Since you mention it, it's worth noting that economic conditions immediately preceding the great depression have some key similarities to some of the problems we're having now (a lot of investor fuckery, monopolies, and just outright scams, a lot of adults in a condition of economic precarity, rising global geopolitical instability, etc) though obviously there are also differences.

There are many quality-of-life metrics we could choose too. For example, if you value going out on the town, the decline of so-called "third places" may be a major drop in quality of life, and if you value watching TV, the proliferation of streaming services could be the best thing that's ever happened