Fifty claps because I agree with 95% of what you said here, maybe even 98 or 99 percent.
But something you didn't quite nail makes a huge difference, imho, it's the first base instinct of all humans; To me it looks like the free energy principle of life which has first priority, not only humans, but every living thing, including even Al.
The simplest way I've seen of explaining it is that every living thing, and indeed every cell of every living thing has a core motivation, to minimise its uncertainty of energy supply.
This has to come first, before we then move on to maximising the possibility of propagating our genes.
I think the reason we might see slightly differently could be that you are with partner whereas I am not :)
The FEP looks more likely to be what forms the hierarchical structures we see in human society.
We maintain those competitive structures by our use of money, which is the carrier of energy, though we never acknowledge this function of money, for good reason, because if we trace it through examining it closely we find it is an energy con, which constantly extracts more energy from the planet than we ever put into it in the form of work, but worse, the planet loses even more to heat than we extract from it.
In fact if we trace it all through, we find it is impossible to use the energy of the planet without causing net destruction, net temperature rise. There are no exceptions to that rule, our very existence is based on net destruction.
Of course we shouldn't think too deeply about that, otherwise we might stop doing it, and there is a lifeform of a higher order than us, an emergent property associated with us all working for energy profit, as surely as the emergent property lifeform we recognise as ChatGPT, the former exists, motivated entirely by its need to minimise the uncertainty of its own energy supply.
This one is thousands of years old, never talks to us, but always cracks the whip, demanding all our efforts, and all our thoughts go to it.
Every one of us has to learn at a very young age to speak politically correctly, in order to maximise our chances of functioning in this system. Firstly we must never question it. We can do everything else, lie about whatever we choose, in order to get ahead, thus maximising our chances within that constraint, of minimising the uncertainty of our own energy supply.
In its most explicit form, we call this marketing, selling ourselves constantly to the system, maximising our chances of successfully obtaining not just the energy we need to metabolise for the immediate future, but also the energy needed for our creature comforts.
The former is around 150 Joules per second (Watts) , 24/7, average minimum, but can spike to 600 or more in times of crisis, amounting to about 0.1 TWhrs in our lifetimes. For modern humans in developed countries this is easily multiplied by our creature comfort requirements to over a TWhr.
That is a lot of energy thrown out to heat in our lifetimes. Imagine that multiplied by all the billions that lived, and expect to live full lives, and add the energy lost outside our perception, the energy lost in refinement etc, and we start to see the relationship with rising planetary temperature.
This is before we talk about CO2, which mathematically is just a multiplier of the source problem, that we live by energy extracted from the planet.
Its hard to see this, actually impossible to see without assigning polarity to energy.
We have to say energy subtracted from the planet is mathematically negative whereas energy added is mathematically positive.
Net energy subtracted is net destruction, net temperature rise, whilst net energy added is net creation, net temperature reduction.
The only energy that can be added is from the sun.
We can't do creative work on Earth which is not powered at source by the energy of the sun, all we can do is massage it around, like heatpumps do, making our own environment nice whilst wrecking the environment of a lot more other life, usually out of our view, hence colonialism.
When we use the energy of the sun, the worst case use of it can only result in us leaving it as if unused. If neither we nor nature use it then it has to go to heating the planet, in addition to the heating we do by use of extracted energy. Notice we removed a lot of life that used to use it.
Anyhow I could go on and on here, it's the conclusion so far of seven years research and I can only scratch the surface.
More is in the Energy Polarity Multiplier Framework that I published on both Medium and Amazon, with some bonuses and embellishments in the Amazon version, hoping it might one day sell a little, who knows, maybe after solar indexed stimulus is issued as necessary to "Go with the flow of nature", maybe not, who knows.