You’re sweeping a lot under the rug with that first sentence: Society will adapt. Yeah sure, barring global catastrophe, it will. Doesn’t mean people won’t die and suffer in the process.
I’m making no claims about good vs. bad jobs here; people can self-actualize however they like in my book. Nor was I making any specific point about epidemiology of deaths of despair in the recent past, but I think that trend serves to illustrate the overall point.
It’s all about the rate of change: neoliberal globalization has brought down wages across industries, so fewer good jobs are left, and the not-so-good ones barely keep up the same standard of living.
From a neutral historical perspective, some serious pearl-clutching about jobs is not ill-founded.
As you say, people in the past facing these circumstances didn’t all commit suicide. Yet some did it explicitly, some did it indirectly with alcohol or other vices, others just lived less fulfilling lives than they otherwise would have. Nonetheless, we are very much encouraging deaths of despair en masse with our current societal outlook.
The best resource on this front is Michael Bazzell’s Extreme Privacy Guide, written for dealing with exactly the sort of situation you’re facing.
https://inteltechniques.com/book7.html