People who desperately need cash aren't speculating huge amounts on crypto. The speculative bubbles are driven by people with extra cash they can gamble on speculative investments.
Crypto has been pushed a way for the little guy to fight back against wall street, but in reality it's a big business for traders with high bankrolls. Someone investing $1000 into crypto and making 10X gains is phenomenally lucky, but $10,000 isn't going to buy them a house. Many of the biggest winners in crypto are the very wealthy individuals who could afford to gamble $10K or even $100K on an ultra speculative investment because losing everything wouldn't appreciably impact their wealth.
It's also important to ask where the money is coming from when someone claims high crypto gains. If someone bought $1000 of DOGE and sold it for $10,000 later, where did the $9000 profit come from? It comes from new entrants buying DOGE. It's often the casual retail investors who are late to the party, cashing out the early buyers with their purchases.
I understand why you are worried, because it is hard to see how this plays out.
That might seem awful, but that was standard life in the 80s. My parents' families ate out like once a year growing up, never had cable, drove cars until the wheels fell off. My mom had handmade clothes growing up because clothing was still kind of expensive back then, so her grandma would make them new dresses in the summer for the upcoming schoolyear, then sweaters and such in the winter time.
The 60s/70s/80s were not some golden era. People struggled then as now. Economies shifted, jobs migrated from one region to another, cities decayed. They suffered through inflationary periods, deflationary periods, shortages, surpluses, etc.
I don't think so, and people had more time to spare and did more together.
A great example in my life is sailing. I love it, but it's definitely not the best way to travel around our local islands. It's slow, uncomfortable, and kinda difficult.
But, I'd take a sailboat over a motorboat most days. It's enjoyable to "trick" the wind to bring you where you want to go. You're continuing a tradition of boating that goes back around the dawn of civilization. But is it the fastest? Hell no.
Some would argue we don't actually need to do very many more things. There is no simple answer to "What is the human condition?" While we've discovered tendencies in our our natural psyche to design and build, we have many other needs that, I argue, should be balanced.
Just because we're plunked into existence on a planet, does that mean we must be compelled to ignore our desires for peaceful, sustainable existence and instead turn our energies toward empowering everyone to get more accomplished? This goes double when the things we do to help our brother or sister help those in charge 10 times as much. This desire for freedom from divine or overwhelming rule is part of how my country (US) was (ostensibly) formed. We didn't leave England/Europe to form a hyperefficient economy. We left it to escape the weight of an out-of-control social system. [0]
I would argue that in addition to our proclivity for solving puzzles and building, we're gifted an awareness giving us the ability to pick and negotiate which of our desires we will attend to. This awareness is often blunted by those who have a stake in suppressing it. But I argue that spreading and growing this awareness will result in our choosing the things to do most relevant to ourselves rather than our masters. This would include a curtailing of relentless optimization.
Usually at this point, one is challenged with arguments about ceasing tech development leading to an end of healing of suffering through e.g. medical research. However, we can demonstrate that the majority of human medical suffering is actually a result of our misguided abundance. The bulk of our diabetes and heart diseases cases owing to our poor diet, for example. Nor does it mean we must give up medical research entirely. In fact, with our priorities shifted (slowing the throttle on space exploration, for example), we would likely be in a better position to research rare and painful birth defects.
There comes a time to put one's foot down and say, "I will not participate in x/y/z because it doesn't benefit individuals sufficiently."
[0] Imagine facebook and other corporations taking the place of the medieval church, adjudicating marriages and property rights. Is it really that far-fetched?
It started with companies, they had to optimise to compete. As we created a data economy they had to use it in order to optimise that bit further to remain competitive.
Then in continued with our work. Employers optimised employee resource usage, specialising people, monitoring what they do.
Then it moved into people optimising their own work – an obsession with productivity, but it eventually became an obsession with optimising our long term lives – homes, investments etc. The crypto bubble is people looking for get-rich-quick schemes because they need them, everyone else has a side-hustle, good investment, home that's skyrocketing in value, so you have to as well in order to "compete". Just extrapolate out 10 years and you could be poor if you don't get this thing right now that is appreciating in value by 20% a year.
It's crazy. It worries me.