Two things:
A problem with modern society is that to an extent, you feel like you're in a constant battle with the other people around you. Your boss isn't on your side. Everyday you go to work there is the potential of life altering conflict which is ultimately not really in your control. Your company could simply decide to downsize. Through some misunderstanding some idiot with power over you could suddenly decide to destroy. At any time you can be ruined. And you try and try to worry about such things. All, usually, while being stuck in a situation where you can't actually do anything.

And at the same time you then go home in your metal box to your stone or wood box and are otherwise highly isolated.

In comparison, go back to a 'simpler' lifestyle. A farming community. Each ...group/family is relatively self sufficient, which is to say, they go out and plant the seeds, etc and survive off that basis. It really isn't that difficult. There isn't the (at least I surmise) potential of life altering conflict with people who essentially have total power over you on a daily basis.

I read once that actually they had to work so much harder on farms and we're living in luxury today in comparison. This isn't really true. Scott Nearing went off into the wilderness and carved out a good life (he wrote a book called Living the Good Life) for 50 plus years; living to be 100. He said they worked for four hours a day. And this work again, was not the stressful stuff it is in our modern society.

Humans aren't meant to have so much stress on a daily basis. Perhaps occasionally. From evolution there had to be occasional conflicts, fights, tribal wars. But what we have today instead ruins health. Causes unhappiness. Causes mental illnesses. Despite attempts by the sick psychiatry system to make mental illness sound like it's genetic in origin, we know for example that the rate for schizophrenia is much higher in big cities. Why this is I can't say for sure. Perhaps people have hypothesized it's from excessive pollutants? I think though it could just be people put in more stressful situations, more often having to deal with other people, whom they don't consider on the same 'side' and thus instead have to deal with as potential threats. Endless potential threats, more stress, slowly wearing them down.

There would still be conflict in a society where people were more self sufficient. There would still be stress. But it seems it wouldn't need to be such a consistent daily thing.

There is then furthermore the potential isolating factors of all the technology we use. Sitting alone in the dark in front of the TV with what little free time we have (and we have too little free time, we're hardly only working 4 hours a day like Nearing). And the fact we live in one place and then spend half our waking time at some other place far away where we're usually around no one who lives where we actually live.

And so on. All of which isn't to say going back to an agrarian lifestyle would mean instant utopia. I'm sure it's very possible for that to be miserable. But I think we could recognize that from such a lifestyle which is more suitable for the psychology of man and try to incorporate it into how we're living.
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So many books have characters who are in effect caricatures. I think, in a way, this is not a bad thing perhaps. It is maybe kind of like more generalized efforts to take complex human interactions and simplify them into something that is more easily understandable (while not totally losing all truth in the simplification process). And such books with antagonists that stray in the direction of being two dimensional. And in general characters that just aren't as complex as real life people, isn't necessarily a bad thing. It maybe can serve the same purpose in a way.