and also innovation and respect for honest hardworking people

Sure, but it also sounds like OP stopped being grateful. You know, for the little things, like having plentiful food to eat, a roof above your head, being warm in winter, etc. If you read this tirade to 99% of the world population they will laugh in your face. Complaining about not getting enough ketchup with your takeaway, a rental application fee or being tailgated is being privileged.

That's an absurd comparison. If your reality is becoming worse, telling yourself that you should be grateful just because your reality is still better than some random person thousands of miles away doesn't help. Especially if you have no real power to change that other person's reality, BUT have power and a voice to change your reality.

By this logic, no one should ever complain or try to change anything. Because surely, someone, somewhere, has it worse. Got cancer? Well, someone somewhere has cancer AND a two broken legs.

> Awful behavior in general comes from an absence of fear

I assume you meant _specific_ fears about the consequences of one's _specific_ actions (e.g. fear of harming someone else, or fear of receiving backlash for it; or fear of squandering scarce funds for a business).

Fear does not unconditionally bring sanity. I've found widespread, chronic, low-grade background fear to be an equally significant driver of awful behavior (and irrationality), often (but not always) co-occurring with an absence of specific consequences.

(The implication being that trying to "solve" this problem with more general terror, as opposed to specific consequences, would likely backfire.)

Fear doesn’t bring sanity, but scale might. Facing hardships and overcoming them generally seems to give people a sense of scale. It gives people a sense of contentment, which subdues greed.

Then again, hardships do also break people, so I don’t know.

Psychologists might call it controlled exposure to fear, under conditions where you know (or will soon know) that things will more or less be all right / have a safe space to retreat to. (Which is a bit subjective, but most people seem to have a few things in common that they value for their security.)

When it feels like everything is slipping away from you, it’s easier to become desperate. This could be the result of losing your sense of scale, or it could be the result of a genuine, significant threat (or anything in between).

> when you go so long without a substantial recession

2008 was 15 years ago. It caused a lot of pain and human misery, just not among the social classes that typically comment on hacker news.