I was talking to someone the other day that boiled it down to "everyone's trying to solve their Red Queen problem." I was unfamiliar, and the Wikipedia page doesn't seem to support this reading, but the idea is that everyone's running as fast as they can just to stay in place, and the way out is different for every person so no general approach can work for everyone. Any solution will put people right back in the realm of running as fast as they can to stay in place.

You pull out a bottleneck, only to reach another bottleneck. Puts the problem squarely in the realm of myth. Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill. Someone blew my mind one day when they suggested that Sisyphus didn't keep rolling the boulder up the hill because of compulsion, he does it because he finds exquisite meaning in it. He knows every crack, every crevice, how to move most efficiently up that hill. This idea moves the problem from mythological to religious. What is heaven and what is hell?

Some wind up burning out, and reverting to a simpler, more primitive form of life. Yours truly has a hard time seeing that as anything more than a rest stop. As humanity connects and we learn more about ourselves, our minds, and our bodies, we'll start unlocking dizzying heights of human achievement. These things will look like self-inflicted torture.

But at the end of the day, humans yearn for one thing, greatness, elevation, perfection. So they'll keep pushing themselves to that next level.