Can something be done about it? I think so, but it has to start somewhere.
Perhaps we could all learn something from the kids in Hong Kong.
After thinking about it and actively investigating for about 30 years, I've come to much the same conclusion, I think: to wit, most people secretly enjoy their problems and suffering. I remember remarking to friends back in high school, in re: "going steady", that it seems like people are less interested in healthy relationships than in finding the kind of pain they favor.
IMO, We have all the answers.
1.) Early on I found my dad's Neurolinguistic Programming books in a box. Now (the other) NLP gets a lot of mostly-deserved flak for being pseudoscientific, but I understood it then pretty well (it grew out of the same Chomsky Transformational Grammar that informs programming language design, eh) and I can vouch for it's rigour and effectiveness. In a nutshell these folks have discovered the "operating system" of the mind.
The problem there is that first, most people still haven't heard about it, second, many who have dismiss it, and third, many of the people who practice and utilize it are working on marginal improvements (money, sex, etc.) rather than becoming better people.
(The old Illuminati slogan "Our method is science, our aim is religion." seems to me to resonate here. We have discovered the science, whither shall we aim?)
2.) I'm also a Bucky Fuller fanboy. He's an engineer who had a kind of spiritual epiphany one day on the banks of one of the Great Lakes and became a kind of secular techno-scientific messiah. He calculated that, by sometime in the 1970's, our technology would be advanced enough to provide for everyone on Earth "without disadvantaging anyone". During his life he traveled around the world ~85 times (IIRC) and was perhaps the most famous American outside of the USA for a time.
3.) Now that's before you factor in applied ecology (Permaculture, et. al.) Bill Mollison's "Permaculture Designer's Manual" is one of the finest manuals of design ever written, with ramifications way beyond farming and food production. (And with D. Blume's "Alcohol can be a Gas" there's even a model of integrated ecologically harmonious carbon-neutral fuel production. (Bonus: the emissions aren't poisonous.) Geoff Lawton is being pretty literal when he says, "You can solve all the world's problems in a garden."
1.) NLP, 2.) Bucky Fuller Design Science Revolution, and 3.) Applied Ecology taken together seem to me to be the obvious, fun, and easy way to Save the World! I'm not sure, what, if anything, to do about it though...
You're right, but while what's going on in threads like this one and others like it shares many similarities with that, I think it plays a minor role. My estimate of what "it" is, is simply: the human ego - the result of millions of years of crude evolution, forced to live in a world for which it has not yet developed appropriate behaviors, likely in no small part to the fact that our technical and humanitarian capabilities have largely brought evolution, biological at least, to a standstill. Our scientists and industrialists have transported us into the future on a physical level, but from an intellectual and spiritual perspective, we are still cavemen.
I agree with all your other ideas, and could add many of my own.
It's rare to encounter anyone who can see outside this bubble, but also possesses a rational mind. Or....an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out, which is typically what my experience has been in religious and spiritual communities.
Unfortunately neither of us have contact information, some day it would be nice to talk with someone else who sees the same things I do, or something reasonably similar. At the very least it would be enjoyable, and who knows, maybe something useful could even come out of it. Surely there must be others out there somewhere.