Rather than answering this from a historical standpoint, I'm going to see if I can answer it from a psychological standpoint, mostly based on this video. In the video, the argument is made about the hedonic treadmill.

The hedonic treadmill is the idea that, no matter what your status is in life, your happiness level is pretty much the same. A person living in the 21st century is just as happy as a person living in the 19th century (barring any changes in life like getting a job or suddenly going bankrupt), even though the 21st century has an objectively better standard of living.

The above paragraph was all from the video, but the video argued that our happiness in a "perfect" future would be the same as today. I think that we can take the claims from the video and also extrapolate them backwards.

The mind of a person living centuries ago is identical to the mind of someone living today. (ignoring evolution and changes due to malnutrition and hygiene) It is not a stretch to imagine that the amount of stresses and choices and things to wonder about is the same. The stresses may be different, but if we assume the hedonic treadmill model to be accurate, then the amount of stresses and choices a person would make would be the same.

The obvious counterargument to my claim is that stressing about something like, say, having a house is a much bigger stress than stressing about getting a well paying job. I am lucky to say I have always had a home in my life, and so I think that the possibility of being homeless would be a huge stress to me, however I wonder if that would be the case for someone used to being homeless. I'm not saying that not getting a job is on the same level as being homeless, I'm saying that I think that they would cause the same level of stress to someone used to both of those, respectively.

I also apologize for ignoring the main topic of choices, and focusing more on stresses, but I think that the two are very intertwined. If someone is stressed about something, it is because they have to make a choice about how they are going to deal with something.