Socialised (not necessarily socialist) systems are the best bet to cope but there must be an epiphany that this requires drastic changes, one of them being to go all in to maximise productivity.
The drastic change required is simple yet hard: end socialized retirement programs. Everyone needs to work.
95% of all biomass is humans and their farm animals
5% is the rest of mammals... biodiversity is pretty much done on the planet
insects are plummeting, and they're pollinators and food for birds etc.
overfishing in many coastal areas
by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean, and still people think that humanity can't make things on such a large scale... all the fish biomass will be outnumbered by our plastic
kelp forests, bleached corals ... ocean acidification...
rainforests are 90% gone
one third of arable land is now unable to grow much at all
and this is all in a few generations .. ANTHROPOCENE
the climate change is not the most pressing issue at all
us talking about "we can't afford to fix this" is like people playing a videogame and racking up points IN A HOUSE THAT'S ON FIRE -- saying sorry, I can't pause the game to put out the fire... yet the house is the only one we all have.
Put it in perspective ... the number of people on the planet is the input to all these functions. If we went back to having a billion people, and robots doing a lot of the work, we'd have everyone receiving a UBI and be richer and happier. What is this obsession with endless population growth? Humanity was doing just fine with under a billion people, no? We were able to fix child mortality, but now we have to learn about the exponential function...
Because both socialism and capitalism require growth to function. We need a new economic system.
The problem is that we really can't put the fire out.
To extend your analogy, it's like people playing a videogame in a burning house, but the players are competing against each other. And this isn't a normal videogame: the players have implants, wirelessly connected to the machine, which will inject the loser with poison. Whoever loses, dies. So if anyone takes a break from the game to put out the fire, they die (and the fire rages on anyway). The only way to put out the fire is to get everyone to stop the game simultaneously and work together to put out the fire. But that's impossible for these people, because they're greedy and selfish and hate each other and any attempt at working together will be sabotaged somehow by at least one of them.
What can be done in a situation like this? Nothing; just let the fire burn and enjoy the game while it lasts. Hopefully, whoever inherits this planet after humans are gone will be a better species than we were.
Sure, if you count insects and plants it would be way more