It's funny to me how shocked people seem to be at the realization of just how fucking lazy people are. Sure, there are definitely differences in actual improvement through technology compared to sheer laziness. Movies tropes like Idicocray or even animated like Wall-E weren't far off either. It's just so much easier to be lazy. The number of people that do not go down these sci-fi trope timelines will be pretty small to the point of just being the weird odd balls that everyone else would just shut up already.

What's kept us going in the past then? Was it really just poverty?