Is the World Falling Apart? Not at All

Yes. It's amazing how most people can handwave away the health of the biosphere that supports our existence.

The simple fact of the matter is that we are making the planet uninhabitable at a rate that is too low for the average person to understand, while being too fast for species' evolutionary adaptations to kick in.

In a couple of generations we've polluted most bodies of water with some form of pollution, be it microplastics, fertilizer runoff, or a myriad other things whose effects are not understood.

We've altered the Earth's atmosphere to a point where it is, for all intents and purposes, irreversible.

We have no mechanisms to restore fertility and biodiversity to the levels where they used to be before our population explosion. No one would care anyway.

Indeed. People frequently point to reduced poverty numbers as a sign that we are on the right track. And those numbers are impressive, and very important for the people who moved into the "not poor" category instead of the "poor" one.

But....I suspect it has only been possible by a rapid use of carbon energy, and by expansion into the biosphere. I doubt it is sustainable, to use the more literal sense of the word.

Well, what do we expect? We've got a giant human-making machine called the government. If you remove all the fluff and noble-intentions around it, it's core effect is the creation of more people at the expense of the top-producers that are already-existing. Net result being what we see happening to our planet. And the answer is apparently, as usual, is to have "more government". Not more government to reduce population or to make us more efficient in usage, but to punish the heavy-users and heavy-producers.

It's all fine and dandy to help people, and to move the destitute and suffering out of poverty and struggle, but we've gone way beyond that. I'd argue that we've gone way too-far and we're now actively breeding more people than we should-be. Eventually, it'll get to a point where we either destroy the environment permanently and X% of the world dies off as a result, we discover some sort of tech-utopian-advancements that negate all the bad effects and we live happily ever after, or we start saying no to more humans and go forward as a society in a sustainable way where tech and conservation technology follows-pace with our population growth.

Uncomfortable questions await us in the future.

"Is the world falling apart? Not for the wealthy and privileged"

Of course the world is improving on metrics like "deaths by natural disasters". That's just a consequence of technologies and infrastructures improving over time, and charitable funding to developing nations that aren't corrupt to the point that the money just ends up with their politicians.

"Sure we're all getting better, just look at global food and safety" is as inanely pointless an argument as "of course nothing is getting better, just look at poverty and corruption" - both lie on opposite ends of the most obvious basic spectrum of human behavior. If all you're worried about is "will I be alive and breathing" then yes, by all means, you have an "optimistic" future.

The political and economic trends of major countries might seem insignificant in comparison, but the world takes its cues from first-world countries. The state and progress of things in first world countries are a pointer to where things are going to go in those nations once the lowest levels of Maslow's hierarchy are covered.

Do you have a counterargument to the doom and gloom?

I mean, if an asteroid is headed to Earth it's not uncalled for to be doom and gloomy. It really does suck. The same goes for possibly eliminating most of the life on the planet and with it the ability for human civilization to persist.

I was one of the commenters near the thread you link to; the story was about pervasive melting of Alaska's permafrost. Again in that thread, you complained about "doom and gloom", and remarked "It's not the end of world, people."

Here's the problem with this kind of comment. There is a specific issue under discussion, and instead of discussing the issue (e.g., technical fixes or mitigations), you complain in very general terms about the attitude of the people who are trying to discuss it.

Here, you have further offered (without evidence) a just-so story about "thinking negatively" as an adaptation that is no longer serving those negative people out there.

This kind of objection is especially galling in the case of climate. There are powerful forces that are blocking mere understanding and measurement of climate trends - much less mitigation. It's not "doom and gloom" to recognize the possible impact and to measure and understand. It's solid technical problem-solving. It's the reason things are getting better.