Maybe you need to meet more humans. At some point you'll realize that perhaps 60%, but likely more, of humans are horses, as far as your comparison goes.

Until and unless they are completely and utterly without alternatives most humans will not look to be creative, plan for the future or look for work. Even when they don't have a choice, look at the amount of work government puts into helping them do so, and for how little result. When it comes to living among 20-30 year olds, they simply recently were without alternatives, and were creative and looking. But only for a short while. Some of them for a few years, but those are exceptions.

I would even go further. In regions where an economic collapse utterly devastated the local economy and completely wiped it off the face of the earth, there are plenty of humans. There are such regions in Africa and in Asia (requirement seems to be that a human must reasonably be able to survive the winter there, so they are located close to the equator). The humans living there are not looking to improve their (very, very, very bad) situation.

I disagree with the point you're making as well. You have to go back some ways, but essentially from the peak of the Roman Empire, at least until the renaissance (we're talking about a good millenium here), unemployment (non-subsistence labour) was going up. Well, it was going up for a few hundred years until it got deep in the 90%, and then it remained there for the rest of the millenium. Obviously, local huge swings were common (e.g. wars). Some say that entire religions (ie. islam) are essentially the result of the employment situation at the end of the Roman Empire (and specifically the raiding in that religion). The economic story of the world is very much not a story of continual improvement.

So that humans do not try to improve their situation even goes down to zero. Even when the economic situation gets so bad that you're unlikely to survive your twenties (well, technically you're unlikely to make it to 1 year old, but if you get to 1 year old, odds are good you'll make 25, not much more though). Even under a situation that bad, the incredibly trivial efforts needed to improve that are not getting done (mostly basic sanitation). I am not talking about regions with famine, quite the opposite. I'm talking about regions where humans can survive growing zero food, so there never is any famine, never any need for anything but the most basic amount of work. You get basic shelter, you eat berries and you on occasion make a fire and roast some small animals.

So no, it is very much not a given that the economic situation recovers. Not a given at all. If you take the total amount of time that the human race existed and you take the years where recovery "always" happened, and you compare with time where the economic situation allowed for nothing other than subsistence farming, you will find that subsistence economics doesn't just dominate, everything else is so small that you'd better use a log scale and even then ...

We live in a period that is incredibly, incredibly much better than any other period in history, but it's duration (so far) is utterly insignificant. Is it the beginning of an open-ended incredible period of history ? Could be. Seems like a long shot when you look at the long term though. A very, very, VERY long shot.

Many animals have had such periods. Periods where economics made so much sense that they utterly dominated the world for a short while. Some even used tools, though of course we do it quite a bit more. None of those animals' golden ages lasted. Are we truly sufficiently different ?