You're absolutely right that "everything isn't broken" and some things are better. The problem is that all the better things are mostly not helping ~90% of the population. You do have orders of magnitude better access to information and better gadgets, but that doesn't help you make your bills or plan for retirement (essentially impossible today if you are not rich).

Like I said, generally speaking everything is inflating but wages and technology products. We are in something that I've heard called "in-deflation" -- inflation in everything you need, deflation in everything else, and stagnant wages and employment. I think this is at least as bad as the stagflation of the 70s, though obviously a far different phenomenon.

I'm not completely convinced that this isn't the result of the "limits to growth."

Americans love apocalypses. They think everything will happen suddenly, explosively, in a film directed by J.J. Abrams with a lot of explosions and a plucky hero. The reality is that things like LTG may manifest very slowly and without much fireworks.

Scenario:

Commodities just inflate, and inflate, and inflate, and eat up surplus wealth for all but the top. Surplus wealth at the top then inflates things like real estate. Demand collapses, hollowing out employment and accelerating the whole thing (deflationary spiral). Eventually the middle class is destroyed.

Then assuming a fairly bad case scenario the die-off begins, but also slowly. In the third world it starts first through warfare, revolutions, disease, and starvation. Finally it slowly progress to the "first world" in the form of decreased longevity and increased mortality among the now impoverished majority unable to afford good health care any longer. Since contraception is still available in the first world, birth rates don't spike as they might in poorer places. This saves the developed world from birth spike / death spike Darwinian hell. We go not with a bang but a whimper.

In the end we have falling population, collapsing economies, and a wealthy elite cloistered in a few surviving high-tech mega-cities. These are dystopian police states however -- like Singapore with more police brutality and arbitrary power -- so it kind of sucks for them too. Of course the vast global slum also is a police state, but policed more haphazardly with drones and such.

In the even longer term these too collapse or are overthrown by angry populist revolutions, knowledge is forgotten, and we're back in some kind of dark age. Tall tales are told of the great science and power of the fallen high civilization of old, but also of how its arrogance offended the Gods and brought about its fall... etc.

Unfortunately our high-tech civilization is a one-shot. Fossil fuels and concentrated mineral deposits are now depleted. We fell victim to the same game-theoretic Great Filter as everyone else. See: Fermi Paradox.

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The above may not occur. The future is hard to predict and complex. But that, I think, is a good expression of how the world looks today and where it looks like it's going. It looks as hellishly pessimistic as the 70s, if not worse.

In the 1990s a rising tide lifted all boats, opportunity was exploding for everyone, and the Internet was going to transform our society for the better and empower everyone. Libertarianism was popular. That wonderful age ended on 9/11/2001, though the writing was on the wall when the dot.com crash started in 2000. Since then I've seen nothing but escalating pessimism and depression among the general public, though the parallel universe alpha cities of the coasts seem partially exempt.

Today the tide is falling but the biggest boats are still rising, opportunity is collapsing for the majority, and the Internet is a surveillance and distraction machine where people look at stupid cat pictures and blob comics while AI profiles them to sell them stuff or manipulate them. Authoritarianism is experiencing a renaissance -- both in populist and hyper-elitist forms.

Much like the 70s the music and culture is mostly trash with the exception of a few indie gems. Cinema is remakes of reboots, music is mass produced soulless auto-tuned Muzak, and the Internet has developed a trash culture of its own centered on dumb memes, blob comics, echo chambers, filter bubbles, and verbal abuse.

I miss that optimistic world, and much like those in the 70s I worry that it was the apex of civilization... maybe even of intelligence on this planet for this geological epoch. Of course in the 70s you could have said that about the 50s and 60s, so hopefully it's a cycle.