Because these trivial matters aren't trivial.
Putting food in the table isn't trivial, finding jobs isn't trivial either.
Once life becomes guaranteed, our outlook will change.
When I realized my partner was (mostly) both able and willing to support me through what turned out to be a prolonged mental health crisis that few would've had sympathy for, it completely changed my life. The amount of suicidal ideation I experienced plummeted. I was no longer crippled by fear that I'll be abandoned and imprisoned/homeless if I can't always live up to some externally imposed standard of output. I eventually became more able and willing myself again to 'give back', but with a new & improved perspective.
Unfortunately, far too many have nothing like this. I am extraordinarily privileged and have to continually process the guilt which comes along with that fact.
None of us asked to be born. In any truly forward thinking culture, the option to receive the basic essentials of life without being overly marginalized for not always having anything substantial to offer in return should 100% be a requirement. I believe many if not most 'deaths of despair' would be obliterated by such an approach, and that a large number of people who would've otherwise died could ultimately give back to their communities in enough ways to make the long term costs justifiable to even the most cynical economist.
We’re already there. The US alone makes more than enough food to feed billions of people year round. That humans aren’t ensuring basic needs for all humans is a choice-the resources exist but people aren’t able to access them. (This isn’t saying everyone who wants to eat steak is going to be able to eat steak. It’s assuming basic caloric needs.)
Then there’s the inefficient allocations of resources that could boost production. The building water infrastructure where needed, etc. It’s all doable but not done.
Still, all the fuss about maximum individualism, petty politics and celebrities feels so utterly irrelevant, it’s frustrating for me sometimes. Here we sit, apes with a giant brain, the most complex structure in the known universe, and we use it to haggle commodities, shift borders a bit and stare at short videos on people’s opinion on other people?
Don’t you ever get that sad revelation that we’re all just moving in a spinning wheel, a dead end? The Fermi paradox being nothing but stagnation after a convenience threshold?
You need to cut us a bit of slack. We’ve only just barely developed the very beginnings of a technological society. By definition, we have the absolute lowest level of sentience necessary to achieve that, otherwise we’d have done it earlier.
On a scale of general Intelligence necessary for civilisation from the minimum of 1 to hundreds, or thousands, or even more we score a 1. And that’s at best, arguably the general population are riding on the coat tails of the few geniuses that actually develop our technology. So most of us are actualy below that.
