On the other hand, we're now facing situations that we've never faced before, both as a species and as individuals. Increasingly, we're moving towards a future where you will never need to leave your home or interact with anyone. Netflix, and Amazon deliveries. Self-driving cars. Kids will eventually get their education online. Virtual reality is under active development.

Then there's AI, and sex robots. Why bother with a real boyfriend/girlfriend when you can talk to your phone and have an artificial companion? Real humans have their own wants and needs and may not do what you want. Worse, they might leave you. Your robot girlfriend on the other hand, you could have endless conversations with her in which she tells you exactly what you want to hear and never challenges you.

That's far-fetched, you say. In the near term, I tried Tinder and it's pretty addictive. An endless stream of new people I can meet. Most of them want nothing serious though. They don't even want to sleep with you more than once or twice for the most part. It's all about novelty-seeking. It seems to me like increasingly few people want a sustained relationship. Breakups hurt, so let's never risk having one, a constant stream of lovers is emotionally safer in a way, I suppose, but I can tell you it definitely leaves me feeling lonely.

> Humans have faced lots of problems over the millenia, but the reality is that our lives continue to improve as a whole

That's untrue. Human civilizations tend to go through cycles. They rise, eventually stagnate, and then decline over the span of hundreds of years. The Akkadians, the Mycenaeans, the Romans, and the Maya all collapsed and the lives of people living in those empires got worse, often for a very long time.

It's reasonable to think that a similar type of decline is happening in the west today.

I think comparing modern day civilization to the rise and fall of the Roman empire is a mistake, particularly European civilization. We learned our lesson. We’re not building empires, not waging expensive wars, not succumbing to armed revolution. People are for the time being mostly happy and prosperous.

That isn’t to say we don’t face challenges, but they’re fundamentally different from those of the empires of old. Something changed with true global markets, and mutually assured destruction.

I'm using ancient empires as an example because pretty much everyone agrees on what happened in ancient history. It's not a controversial / political issue to talk about Rome falling because nobody who was involved in those empires is alive today.

> We learned our lesson. We’re not building empires, not waging expensive wars

I don't know where you live, but here in America we've been at war with various Middle-Eastern nations for the last 2 decades. About 90% of the history of our nation has been spent involved in some kind of a war. Those are expensive wars too. We've spent trillions on Afghanistan alone. We have around 800 formal military bases in 80 foreign countries.

I think that we are far more imperialistic than the Romans, even though our culture doesn't acknowledge it.

> global markets, and mutually assured destruction

Yeah, we have better technology too and a very different financial system. However, this hasn't saved us from expressing many of the same symptoms that ancient collapsing empires had... Especially the social issues that this article talks about.

> Humans have faced lots of problems over the millenia, but the reality is that our lives continue to improve as a whole..not get worse.

I think this is no longer true. Life expectancy is actually on the decline in developed countries, driven by (among other factors) the loneliness epidemic described in this article.

You can argue over 5,000 years or something things have improved, sure, but in the present day there's a strong argument that quality of life is getting worse.

Wouldn't it be ironic if the reason they continue to improve, is because of our fear that it won't?

A little fear, and skepticism of the future, is a good thing.

> but the reality is that our lives continue to improve as a whole..not get worse.

This is true for some, not others.

"as a whole"