Not exactly disagreeing because I really don't know any better. But whenever I hear comments like these, I wonder if isolated peoples or medieval/industrial revolution population have/had a better life then we do. We have conveniences that far surpasses anything a king could have just a few decades ago. Our life expectancy and IDH is (almost) monotonically increasing.
I really expect that efficiency growth will make the world converge to a life style where most people don't have to work to survive, but just to acquire luxury goods. I actually think that maybe we could already be at that point if it wasn't for the "sadists that run the world", but I don't think they can prevent it from happening because that will make them make more money too.
So, I really don't know if people criticizing our current state as "an immense disaster" are overly pessimistic or if the people (like myself) thinking that the world is in a never before achieved good state are realistic or uninformed.
I fear deterioration beyond repair, like irrecoverable climate change, because an event like that would really separate the very rich from rest of the population in a way that only one of these two partitions could survive. But I don't think we'll reach that point my lifetime.