Comment by FloorEgg
8 days ago
Yes they said "relative superabundance". Relative to history there is an abundance of most good and services (including food and housing).
As a Gen Z or Gen A I'm sure it doesn't feel this way, but that's mostly because they are comparing themselves to what they see on social media instead of comparing themselves to how people actually lived 100 years ago, or how people in developing nations lived 20 years ago.
I think point the OP was making is that as we grow abundance people will still be miserable because as expectations rise satisfaction falls. Also most people are susceptible to envy, and the more stuff there is the more statistically likely it is to be distributed unevenly.
Even if the average person's circumstances improve objectively from generation to generation, people's 's instinct are to fixate on the parts of their lives theyre unsatisfied with and to compare themselves with others who are better off - leading to subjective misery.
The material abundance is largely present, the social fabric is destroyed. Only one of those turned out to be important for sanity.
It's hard to untangle states from their derivatives when determining causes and effects in complex systems.
Maybe social fabric breaking down is a consequence of phase transitions, maybe it's a natural part of collective lifecycles.
Either way I suspect it has more to do with change than absolute state, and it's probably natural (and unpleasant to live through).
I feel mostly like an outsider these days in my optimism that the future will be better, especially in the medium to long term.