This shows some removal of certain mindsets from reality. It might have been true around the seventies there was progress in improving the quality of life etc, but if we look honestly now, it's started to revert back.
We had supersonic commercial air travel, humans travelling to the moon, and reusable spacecraft in the seventies but they disappeared nearly as quickly as they appeared.
Now, fifty years later we are struggling to keep the doors on even budget commercial aircraft in flight, and the efforts of "Starship" and space X are a joke compared with what NASA was, and achieved.
Life expectancy, which should have continued to extend with cures for cancer etc, if there was still "progress", is going back down now also. We don't do cures for profit because those would stop all possibilities of profit, we do management of symptoms at profit, and this never ends well, either the patients dies early, or the patient becomes dependent on treatment in a way that locks in the source problem, even generating business cases to then reinforce the source problem.
CO2 management is a good example.
I put this down to profitability which is related to availability of energy to extract, because profit is exclusively extracted energy, and the latter is depleting, hence the reason profitabilty is going down. This impacts all margins reducing the capability of, and all possibility of, more and more previously profitable businesses offering all kinds of things, previously are no longer offered because it's longer possible to make profit by those businesses.
We should not be surprised human and life benefiting productivity are dependent on increasing energy availabilty, and we should not be surprised when the latter reduces, it drags down quality of life for all, from the richest to the poorest, the poorest feeling the most pain, even genocide.
The requirement to keep making profit throughout keeps us locked into this self defeating behaviour as a species.
We all of us need personally to make energy profit to maintain at least the energy we each need to metabolise every day 24/7, unless parents or state, and/or previously "earned" wealth pay for our existence, but then those beneficiaries need to find further sources of profit to find that additional energy also to remain solvent / alive themselves.
We define businesses as dead when they can no longer make profit, regardless of whether or not they add benefit to life, because nobody and nothing can remain profitable or even alive without replenishing the energy put out into things unprofitable.
At least that was true until solar energy came along.
We have to blame the profit driven system for no longer meeting the requirements of improving life, it's no longer fit for purpose, due to its dependence on availability of energy to extract.
The latter has gone down, not just fossil fuels energy but all energy from the planet.
There is less available to take because we've used it all. The battery is running out.
This is what I call the global energy problem, and what you call "A hobby", Ben.
Cory Doctrow correctly and aptly identifies much of the same observations, but not all (yet, he will have to), as Enshittification.
I extend that by adding it to Bullshit Jobs and bullshit business, giving us a system, which gives us the make believe world of Enshittopia.
We progress further and further into that world, the more we remove ourselves from the harsh reality that the world is ending, due to our actions, all of our actions, and it comes with all kinds of horror, that we'd rather not think about.
So we we live in Enshittopia, carrying on destroying the real physical world, at profit.
Enshittification, at least all encompassing Enshittification seems to be something thats only been around since availabilty of energy began to decline. There was always corruption but Enshittification is the corruption of all law and order, it all ends up screwed, nothing can survive it, not even Enshittopia, because the latter is a bubble, it will burst very suddenly, the sooner the better.
Talking about it, will help burst it pretty quick.
I only talked about the problem here.
If I talked about the solution I'd need 5 or ten times this much writing to even scratch the surface.
The point is, I think you might be living in Enshittopia, Ben.
The Enlightened individual surely doesn't live in Enshittopia, right?