It’s almost like our entire society was not designed to support human flourishing, but rather is an elaborate mechanism for extracting the maximum amount of labour in exchange for the least amount of all source support.
That definition encompasses significantly more than half of the population, at least measured in terms of lifelong taxes paid vs social services received.
For example, minimum wage workers, stay-at-home parents, etc. They receive social services, such as roads and education, that are substantially more costly than what could be supported with the taxes they will pay in their life. Those services are paid by a small percentage of workers, something like the top quintile or the top decile.
That said, I would argue that e.g. the work performed by stay at home parents is on the whole positive to society, since at the very least older generations (retirees) need the goods and services provided by the younger generation of workers, and somebody needs to have raised them. But it is still interesting to think about how our societies economically rest on the shoulders of a snall fraction of the population.
there's also the issue that compensation doesn't actually track contributions to society very well. I build things at huge scale that are at least somewhat useful. I now make about 10x what I made heating up $2 slices of pizza, which seems about right. but I could get paid the same or possibly more to optimize ad clickthrough, which doesn't seem quite right. a lot of money gets spent on trying to win red queen races. I don't really fault the individuals involved for following the local incentive gradient, but they're essentially getting paid to break each other's windows and then fix them. there's no net value there.
From the perspective of our skin cells, which constantly live and die to protect the rest of the organism from outside threats, our own biological evolutionary process has not led to their flourishing. And yet here we are hunans, a society of cells, rather fit to survive yet abother day in the real-world evolutionary environment.
I don't know if you are aware, but you've almost directly stated the core thesis of Mein Kampf.
Here is a Yale professor of history explaining just that:
I had no idea, but I doubt that it is written from the perspective of looking at this as an "unpleasant fact".
Older people who live in cities and planned, theme park-like communities - which facilitate car-less, low-distance daily social activity outside the home - tend to do better.