I personally struggle to see ways my life has meaningfully improved since 2019 or so, and I feel like many people share this view. I have been an unquestionable fanatic of tech startups back then, which I consider perhaps the "golden age".

These days I view tech startups with suspicion, I question what is the ulterior motive. Somehow when upstart companies were like "Pebble", this wasn't a thing.

The original comment refereed to humanity in general, so my point was more like: Humanity's average life improved over the last few thousand years, and many people having the best life compared to everyone else in this timeline.

If you are living in a western country in most of the cases you have access to regular food, water, shelter, amusement. So all the basic needs and the possibility and freedom to pursue what you want to do. Even in developing countries the number of people that suffer from serious illness and hunger declined very much. On a macro perspective we all having a better life.

From a personal perspective, yeah there might be set backs, but this has nothing to do with humanity in general I would argue.

Also regarding the "golden age" of tech startups ... was it really like this or was it only nostalgia and something you saw in the companies that was never there in the first place? OpenAI was once also a very OPEN company ... they published their research, open sourced stuff and then they needed money.

I think that a company never should be idolized that much, in the end they are caring for money and keeping their operations running, not something else.