It is amazing you manage to read this all into my post. Of course life is hard for many people in the world, but things are getting better every year for the average person. This seems to not include the average HN poster who seems to be caught in a depressed funk.
It's almost as if people's emotional states come from things other than making entirely rational big picture judgements about the state of the "average person" on the whole planet.
I'm curious if you have, at some point in your life, met another human being? All evidence would point to "yes", and yet here you are, all over this thread, debunking other peoples' subjective mental states with your superior facts and logic. As people do.
It is tempting to picture you striding confidently through a mental health ward, heels clicking authoritatively. As you approach each patient, you lean down and gently impart a optimistic fact from Nature or The Economist ("did you know that rates of cholera have declined by 60% in 2018 alone"). In your wake, sparks of life return to the previously dead seeming eyes of troubled teenagers and despairing middle-aged men.
You offer up statements about population aggregates as a supposed explanation for the self-reported mental states of a collection of individuals, so you don't really get to reasonably complain about this.
