This might be the worst possible way to get a genuine feel for what life was like. For whom?

Industrialization and telephones were ubiquitous. We'd witness the rise of automobiles, flight, antibiotics, DNA, nuclear power, computers, space exploration...

A massive shift towards urbanization. Life expectancy jumped up. Migration took off. Society became more consolidated, diverse, and aged.

Human rights started getting more institutionalized. Civil rights and feminist movements made great gains. Globalism and mass consumer culture similarly boomed.

A great depression and two world wars generated a sense of unity from people coming together to get through hard times and overcome common enemies, but it deteriorated quickly under the pressure of rapidly shifting cultures and lifestyles.

A person's experience of this depends on a lot. People in different demographics would have drastically different stories to tell.

Imho the best way to get a broad feel is to track the technology. People were able to call each other, travel long distances with relative ease, get effective medicine for common maladies, and pop into the corner store to buy handy items.

But it was a lot harder to access information generally, and a lot less was available before everyone was carrying around gps enabled cameras all the time. It was a lot easier to believe in urban legends and a lot harder to understand how advanced technology worked.