In most media, peasant life is portrayed as horrible. Peasants are considered as perpetually muddy, sick, enduring backbreaking work and eating rotting bread etc. It is a pretty common trope to regard peasant life as "the worst kind of existence."
However, this seems to be a pretty suspect view. From the various things I've read and considered (though not having read anything particularly in depth on the subject besides 19th century political economy books), small agricultural communities in the middle ages seemed (when not beset by war, plague and other disasters) quite tranquil, stable and capable of meeting most basic and higher order human needs. One would grow up in a tight-knit community where everyone had a purpose and was supported by others, alongside institutions like the local church and such. While people appeal to the grand scale of corruption in the medieval clergy, it seems local churches were mostly means of community services. Peasants would clock off work to enjoy social activities, probably often at the tavern with some drinks, and when farm work was done partake in handicraft, fishing etc. Essentially, peasant communities seem like they were capable of fulfilling people's need for a sense of purpose, social relations, a varied set of activities etc. Clearly the extraction of surplus produce by the feudal system hindered the capacity for these communities to make the most of their means, however I don't see how this would have made peasant life entirely awful besides when there were cases of particularly malevolent Lords.
It seems like people notice the worst of things, e.g. war, famine etc, and get the view that these things were the status quo. Clearly a lot of this is a matter of time and place and varies considerably, but I'd assume many aspects of it were pretty stable.
Is my perspective too rosy? Was everyday peasant life truly awful in a fundamental way?
This is a tough question to answer with any degree of specificity because there was a plurality of experiences for peasants across Europe and the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages. However, in general, the economic life of medieval peasants was perilous. Subsistence agriculture provides little job security. A bad harvest could spell devastation for you, your family, and your community. I suggest taking a look at the online English translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for evidence of famine/drought/general devastation in the British Isles. Here are a few examples from just the eleventh century - a time when the Commercial Revolution (which brought substantial increases in agricultural production and peasant populations) was beginning to take hold:
A.D. 1005… This year died Archbishop Elfric; and Bishop Elfeah succeeded him in the archbishopric. This year was the great famine in England so severe that no man ere remembered such.
A.D. 1070… There was a great famine this year.
A.D. 1082. This year the king seized Bishop Odo; and this year also was a great famine.
A.D. 1087. After the birth of our Lord and Saviour Christ, one thousand and eighty-seven winters; in the one and twentieth year after William began to govern and direct England, as God granted him, was a very heavy and pestilent season in this land. Such a sickness came on men, that full nigh every other man was in the worst disorder, that is, in the diarrhoea; and that so dreadfully, that many men died in the disorder. Afterwards came, through the badness of the weather as we before mentioned, so great a famine over all England, that many hundreds of men died a miserable death through hunger. Alas! how wretched and how rueful a time was there! When the poor wretches lay full nigh driven to death prematurely, and afterwards came sharp hunger, and dispatched them withall! Who will not be penetrated with grief at such a season? or who is so hardhearted as not to weep at such misfortune? Yet such things happen for folks' sins, that they will not love God and righteousness.
We do not have census data or detailed tax records to corroborate the extent of these famines, but we nonetheless have to assume that they were disruptive to peasants living off the English land. Entries like these from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are echoed across other Latin chronicles and in Arabic ones as well. I am most familiar with The Complete History of Ibn al-Athir, which mentions numerous famines across the Islamicate World. Take, for example, his account of a long-lasting famine in Ifriqiya (roughly modern Tunisia) in the 1140s:
It had a terrible effect on the population, who even resorted to cannibalism. Because of starvation the nomads sought out the towns and the townspeople closed the gates against them. Plague and great mortality followed. The country was emptied and from whole families not a single person survived. Many people travelled to Sicily in search of food and met with great hardship.
Since medieval sources tend to be written from the perspective of literate men based in cities or monasteries, the perspective of peasants is often only briefly mentioned. It is likewise difficult to make any concrete estimations about lifespan, infant mortality rate, and nutrition for most medieval peasant communities due to lack of sources (although the picture begins to come into focus during the Early Modern Period). When we read about a “great famine” in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or The Complete History of Ibn al-Athir, we therefore have to imagine that a bad harvest - caused potentially by drought, an early frost, heavy rains, or conflict - brought with it immense human suffering and the displacement of communities from their ancestral homes.
This is not to say that peasant life was only defined by suffering at the hands of subsistence agriculture and overly aggressive landed elites. We know that there were robust and complex communities in rural medieval villages, many of which survived the ordeals brought by mother nature. I recommend Judith Bennett’s biography of Cecilia Penifader as a microhistory of peasant life in the English town of Brigstock during the late-thirteenth through mid-fourteenth centuries.
For those interested in environmental data related to medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, I highly recommend the Old World Drought Atlas, which uses dendrochronological (tree-ring) data to chart annual rainfall across the region. This link shows annual rainfall in Europe in 1315, the first year of The Great Famine in Europe. As the link shows, there was abnormally heavy rainfall across Western Europe. This corroborates written sources, which detail how heavy rains destroyed harvests and had profoundly negative consequences for peasants.
Just to add on to u/labarge3's answer, I think a lot of the view of peasant/rural life in general (not just Medieval European peasant life) also boils down to seeing the glass as half full or half empty.
This can be amply seen even in 19th and 20th century views of Russian peasant life by Russian intellectuals. So the very same peasant communities could be evaluated as either semi-barbarous, drunken and violent, or the embodiment of Russian national character and the repository of the true Russian soul. Infamously in the case of the Narodniks, a group of Russian intellectuals who undertook a "going to the people" movement in the mid 1870s (to provide education and greater political consciousness among the peasantry), the very same intellectuals who romanticized peasant life became very embittered by their exposure to actual rural conditions, and the general hostility and social conservatism of local peasants.
So I guess I would say that maybe consider looking at your own assumptions from other perspectives.
A "tight-knit community where everyone had a purpose and was supported by others" would sound great to one type of person, but seem unremittingly hopeless and stifling for another person whose beliefs did not adhere to community norms, or who aspired to a change in life settings. Even in the 20th century, despite with increased access to education, Russian rural inhabitants tended to be relatively undereducated, with limited means of personal advancement, beyond gaining enrollment in an educational or training program and hopefully moving out to a town or city. For Medieval Europeans, depending on the time and place, maybe the clergy would be a similar option, but very few peasants were able to leave for towns or cities.
Peasants who "enjoy social activities, probably often at the tavern with some drinks" sounds pleasant, but flip this view on its head and you might see rampant alcohol abuse, resulting in violence (especially domestic violence), rape, and debt. Alcohol use especially was an item noted among the Russian peasantry - often defended by peasants as a means of asserting personal independence and an ability to flout social norms, it could lead to much violence and deepened poverty. A peasant who could "When farm work was done partake in handicraft, fishing etc." might sound like a self-sufficient farmer engaging in hobbies or pastimes, or could just as easily describe an impoverished peasant desperately looking to supplement income or food sources.
So again, as mentioned already, there wasn't one single "peasant experience", as situations could vary dramatically across time and place. But even when a peasant community was relatively secure, and even prosperous (as far as subsistence agriculture ever truly is), it was still a very limited and precarious life. And frankly, even today with mechanized agriculture, farmwork is very muddy and backbreaking - that's the nature of the job.