It does not take a genius to unearth the deep, dark secrets of happy people everywhere: get married (and invest in your spouse). Have children. Make G-d part of your life. Build healthy and productive relationships in your family, your marriage, your community and your faith. See your existence as part of something greater than just your own life. Try to see things positively.
But of course, people increasingly do not do these things. Relationships are shallow and selfish, with hedonism the order of the day. Marriage is on the wane. Investing in children?! Outside of Israel, no first-world country is even having children at a replacement rate. Judeo-Christianity is in such full-scale retreat that in some countries, a person who dares to quote the Bible risks prosecution for hate speech. People are not investing in themselves or, for that matter, anyone else. They wallow and revel in misery and quiet desperation, trumpeting euthanasia as the easiest way to end their suffering. At the cutting edge, people castrate themselves. Mind-boggling.
We are witnessing personal and societal self-immolation. Which not only runs counter to the assertion that people seek happiness (they clearly do not), but it also seems to run counter to any understanding of seeking our own rational self-interest.
If I did not know better, I would say that the world is suffering under a series of curses.
Which may be what is really happening. After all, the Torah is full of curses that will happen for those who turn their back on G-d. At the core of those curses is civilizational decline, and a profound loss of hope and optimism. I think we all may be witnessing those Biblical curses in real time.
The curses may (or may not) not be clearly attributable to divine wrath, but the net result of people living against the basic principles of the Torah is that they, individually and collectively, end up, in the words of the prophet Hosea, reaping the whirlwind.
In the long run, societies and civilizations suffer from the biblical curses, as well as benefit from the blessings. Societies that lose their purpose are doomed. And that is a biblical curse. If you fail to find meaning (whether as an individual, a family, a community, or a nation), then you become an ideological and genetic dead end.
G-d may or may not be the Prime Mover behind the slow-motion disaster all around us. But either way, I have no doubt that people are its executors. We are, in fact, doing the damage to ourselves, personally, societally and even internationally. We do it through an instinctive belief in validating our own short-term feelings and intense narcissism. We do it by insisting that we are not responsible for anything: Mother Nature or karma or genetics or accidents of birth or white privilege or racism render us powerless victims.
But we, at least those who can see clearly, are G-d’s partners – his agents. The job of saving the world falls to us.