No, it doesn't. This isn't some intrinsic element of humanity, positive societal change requires dedicated effort, will, and resources.
Your point about flying cars is a joke right?Flying cars would kill thousands more and be a huge liability. Maybe the problem in the developed world isn't that things aren't growing or improving, but that people don't appreciate the standard of living they have.
- anything you experience daily becomes a baseline, so people keep complaining about relative differences within their wealth bracket instead of comparing to less wealthy societies
- a typical person in the West doesn't have that much time to enjoy their standard of living, having to slave away 10-12 hours a day (commute included), being burdened with mortgage and possibly other credits, and being one workplace fuckup from serious economic trouble...
Well, part of that is a choice to consume at a rate that requires such work. It's somewhat easy to have a nice financial position by delaying kids and not pouring money into cars and shopping ... but not many people choose that lifestyle.
The FIRE community is all about the alternatives.
Everybody in the community has a different view of things, but for many "retire early" simply means "work on what you want to" rather than "bum around the beach all day for the rest of your life".
There are large subsections that focus on travel, giving up office jobs for being outdoors, and those that are truly much too frugal for my personal tastes.
That's the only place the money can really come from to invest more than I already do.
Because the necessities have been going up at a far faster pace than the digital pseudo-luxuries.
Just as an example, my projected health care costs for 2017 went up by an amount that is larger than a nice phone + eating out every other week combined.
That's just the increase, with no appreciable benefit to me in the services provided.
I'm sure many people could provide similar examples with rent or other necessary services.
And those are unpayable for many people without working overtime, even if they don't consume anything extra.
- I was joking about flying cars but i don't understand your objection to them. Cars are a lot more dangerous; i 've never seen 2 birds collide.
- It's a good thing that people "don't appreciate" that what they have is all they could have; that's what generally drives things forward.
1. https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-cnalp3t9UeS1QEfNt--ZG6ATQ...
2. http://lh4.ggpht.com/fhuebler/SCW62SGJMiI/AAAAAAAAAU4/nIiCXa...
3. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/36/Li...
Just to nitpick, this is how birds of prey hunt :)
You can appreciate what you have and still be cognizant of all the problems affecting you and your surroundings. They aren't mutually exclusive. Improvement and change often bring new or novel sets of problems or may have unintended consequences. I don't believe that enumerating those should necessarily imply ingratitude. That's a slippery slope.
If you ignore gadgets, things have gotten worse for the working and middle classes of most developed nations in the past 30 years. Wages are stagnant yet housing and other essential costs have exploded... largely due to asset price inflation driven by financial attempts to reinflate. The problem is that without wage inflation QE only makes housing more expensive.
People in the developed world would be happier with what they had 30 years ago: stable jobs, pensions, a house, infrastructure that is not crumbling.
[1]: http://cessna.txtav.com/en/piston/cessna-ttx [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessna_400
We're at a world economic point where it is literally cheaper to send chickens from USA to China, process them there, and send the product back to USA than to process them near the originating farm. It's not that hard (with suitable supply chain management, and accounting for economy of scale) to just send that half of my chicken to some guy in Indonesia.