Pompeii was amazing and (as an engineer) humbling. The roads. Build to last hundreds of years. And in a city old enough that they were indeed rebuilt. The plumbing. Steam baths. Clay sewer pipes. Lead supply pipes. Basically the tech we had until the 20th century. I'm looking forward to returning in September.
I liked Herculanum a lot more - since its excavated using modern techniques, its very well preserved, with multi story buildings, interior spaces with preserved decoration.
I was particularly enchanted with the baths / gymnasium / fastfood joint. Could easily imagine living in that place quite satisfactory.
Until of course you get sick with smallpox, or cholera, or just a simple staph infection through a small cut on your finger, which then spreads hellishly with no medical recourse except maybe amputation.
I'm being a bit tongue in cheek about the obvious that you already surely would be aware of, but one underlying, implicit tendency for many people who marvel at the sophistication of Rome and the lives of its famous figures is to subconsciously forget the grime and misery that existed between these shining examples. This was the case on a scale that today isn't seen even in the world's poorest countries.
For the vast majority of people living even in that most advanced and wealthy of ancient civilizations, mortality, disability and disease rates from all sorts of causes would have made much of life very dangerous and sometimes suddenly brutal unless you were purely lucky or particularly careful -but even then quite lucky along the way.
From failing eyesight to hemorrhoids to simple but painful dental problems, the means for dealing with these sorts of pervasive aspects of the human condition would have been either nonexistent or themselves very unpleasant.
I can't remember its name for now, but I once read an excellent book that used reams of old diary entries to describe the miseries, travails and frequent health problems of the regular inhabitants of London in the 18th century. It was positively grim and in some cases downright nightmarish.
This, mind you, at a time when sanitation and medicine were at least starting to move forward again and were placing humanity in the west right at the early stages of the population explosion that civilization is finally winding down today, apparently. I can only imagine that in ancient Rome it was no better.
Another macabre historical detail I remember once reading was that reason for why names like Septimus, Octavius, Decimus and so forth were so common in ancient Rome stemmed from many parents naming their 7ths, 8th, tenth and etc kids just by the numerical order of their arrival to save too much sentimental thought on a baby that was more likely than not going to die long before it matured. A case of grimness so ingrained to the expectations of life that a callous acceptance is taken for granted.
To your point, human life just wasn't very important then unless someone was the very upper class. Even then, killing people and power transitions was fairly common.
You also don't have to go back to Roman times to see how far we've come. Just look at child birth death rates for both the child and mother.
