Between catastrophic climate change and resource depletion, AI, the danger of nuclear war, COVID and other potential pandemics, economic insecurity for most of the population, and farmed irrational extremist political movements, we seem to have quite a lot to deal with.
Might as well just have Carrington Event 2.0 and be done with it.
It's unlikely that any pandemic would make humans go extinct. Covid showed that isolating population groups is possible, especially if bounded by water (Australia, new Zealand etc). Mass death sure, but not extinction.
Climate change will probably reduce livable spaces (although people already live in extremes like Alaska and Sahara) but humans are adaptable and certain parts will still be temperate. Again huge impact, but not existential.
Sure there's a lot of "other stuff" going on, but honestly it has always been thus. Two world wars for example caused several daily concerns for most of Europe, and much of Asia. Throw in revolutions in Russia and China, and independence for India, plus the technology booms, and life in 1950 was different to 1910.
I could write a whole comment on economics, but again a 2 year blip in inflation (it's down again now) is not going to end anything. Given the economic improvements in Asia over the past 50 years (China, S Korea, Japan, Vietnam etc) "most" of the world is better off than before. There's a long way to go, but its been an upward trend for a long time.
With the rise of ecological blow back, resource scarcity/hoarding, and seeing the seeds of authoritarian policies being planted - I suspect that this moat will be used in future to welcome immigrants with open arms. Those arms being rockets, machine guns and grenades.
A grim future ahead if true.
However many of these threats can collapse organised civilisation and push us back to medieval level of development.
Now at 2023 we have lifted more people out of poverty and ill-health in both raw numbers and as a percentage of the population than any time in the planet's history.
Without prescribing anything in so far as dealing with the world's problems, be careful flippantly trading that off. It may not be you, your friends and your family that previously watched their children die and now don't but I don't see that as making this quite frankly stunning achievement as an irrelevance.
Poverty has some very definitional issues with the chosen metrics and I am hesitant to actually draw any conclusions on if it has brought net positive human fulfillment.
In any case the whole system is a pretty precarious place at the moment with rapidly closing windows to maintain stability, and if we don't those "stunning achievements" are going not going to persist in a meaningful way.
It is easy to pull people out of poverty when short term thinking can overshoot beyond long term carrying capacity.