I disagree. That only makes sense if you assume you (and everyone like you) are politically powerless and the rot and decay are inevitable.
There's also another option: redirect that excess effort you're expediting to hoard for the failure into fixing the system before it fails. Your personal efforts to fix it might fail, but some other group that heeded the same call might succeed, and that's all it takes.
Hoarding wealth might seem like a safer bet, but it's just as prone to failure. The kind of wealth you could accumulate through hard work might not be enough to give you the security you want, and to get more you have to take big risks anyway.
I think that's the trap: you can't work yourself to the bone then have energy to work more to be active in your community, volunteer, run for office, pester politicians with letters, etc. Those are the kind of activities that I think could avoid the decay and perhaps even lead to some improvement.
I think it's a mistake to view "donating money" as meaningful response to many current social problems. Many of them are caused or propped up by people with more money than you could ever dream of having. Thinking that mere donations can win is like thinking a group insurgents could win in a stand-up direct fight against the US Army. The insurgents have different advantages than the US Army, and if they're smart, they'll use them rather than futilely attempting to reach parity with the US Army's strengths.
There's definitely some minimum amount of donations that will be required to really change things, but at a certain point I think the returns diminish.
I think it's a mistake to view "donating" as
meaningful response to many current social problems.
A guy on minimum wage can ladle out soup at a soup kitchen every bit as well as I can.
But can he convince my elected representatives that I care about soup kitchens? Or make soup kitchen users into my personal friends? Not so much.
Keeping people busy with real or artificial work is extremely common in dictatorships.
They all disliked unemployed people and often forced them into work or in the military, loathed artists and writers that were able to work independently. They glorified "work for work's sake".
Created work artificially through gargantuan public works, bureaucracy and... war - the ultimate instrument to keep people busy and give them a common purpose.
Not sure if this counts but this image of a soldier mopping in the rain comes to mind.
We need a way for improving things where, when a community improves its own space, the gains don't immediately get privatized.
Other public infrastructure issues could be lack of cheap, affordable internet access, clean water, and health care.
Go down to Figure 53 of this: http://www.nzchildren.co.nz which shows only 1/3 of the poorest 20% attain a high enough level of education to even enter university, while 3/4 of the richest 20% do (the relation is fairly linear for the rest).
Financing the education of children with poor parents helps, it just doesn't equalise on average. Of course it does help a few outlier children a lot.
In NZ we add extra subsidies to schools with poor parents through a system of deciles - but it doesn't offset the difference that much.
I think the idea with funding education more equitably is to remove existing barriers that are created by policy, not about creating totally equal outcomes.
Another approach is to build security through self sufficiency and community based initiatives. For example, growing your own food wherever possible, or community gardens on common land.
There is a long list of examples and ideas where future security, defining that as decent quality of life, health and education, doesn't need to be based around monetary wealth.
Growing your own food is work; where is the retirement plan? What if you're not able? Even if you are, many people want to do things other than farming when they retire.
It feels like the ultimate defeat: what have I achieved in this lifetime of work, when I'm reduced to land-to-mouth existence, like an ancestor tens of thousands of years before me? Where is the progress?
Theft is a problem in community gardens. If you just grow enough to sustain yourself and someone steals your produce, you're back to fucked.
There are simply too many of us to revert back to an agrarian society. We have to create food at a very large scale. Which means we have to become better at sharing it.
Healthcare and education are areas where a common option could make a major difference in people's lives. But I think the "community" has to be pretty large to make a meaningful impact.
Hunger is further down Maslow's pyramid. You can't even begin thinking about things like education until you are able to adequately eat.
Like it or not we're all in it together and we're doing kind of a sucky job of it right now.
We face many problems, to be sure, but this is nothing new.
For that matter, many of my non-tech friends (in their 40s) are already only one health crisis away from being homeless. I only have two couches and they all can't stay with me. I am doing relatively well and even I feel the pressure to overwork and "make hay while the sun shines", so maybe I can help support them when they need it.
Also the perceived society crumbling is self-imposed. Raging culture wars, terrorism as an excuse for totalitarian paranoia, freely accessible firearms, school shootings, obesity epidemic, trade tariffs, monopolistic corporations lobbying for laws, ecological disasters.
Frankly, I'm happy with my European backwater if the cost of getting off well after WW2 would be the list above. No wonder the US collectively is stressed out to the extreme.
It doesn't matter what the data says, the feeling that our society is crumbling is palpable, and that is what drives this overwork.
There is an interesting conflict of interest buried in there, "someone" who is benefiting from your work figures out that if you "believe" that society is crumbling, you will work harder (which generates them more benefit), and so they arrange it so that in spite of the data to the contrary you are left feeling that society is crumbling.
Even the most intelligent and rational person will take action against their own self interest if they believe that such action is necessary. You can see that principle in action all too often today as people get caught up in a conspiracy theory and then decide to take action on their own.
However:
1) I have seen it become commonplace to have several generations of a family living in the same house.
2) I have seen my grandparents struggle to afford prescriptions even with 2 pensions and social security.
3) I have seen a sibling fall into poverty despite making bi-weekly efforts to establish an emergency fund. A totaled car was all it took despite full coverage.
4) I have been a part of the crowd commuting 4+ hours round-trip a day to jobs they can't move closer to.
It definitely feels as though institutions are failing us. I don't think social security will fail, but I do think they'll move the goal post on when we can retire.
There are conspiracies and there's anecdote..
This is true for people all across the board: blue-collar workers, office workers, and doctors.
When they don't get a commensurate benefit form extra work, they won't do it. If there are societies sliding downward it is because they are extracting too much wealth from the people who produce it. Among other things, just eliminating rent seeking would be a boon.
Given that the US is wealthier than most of Europe and yet people work much longer hours with little worker protection, people could could demand much better.