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So we are miserable, getting poorer, afflicted with disease, on the verge of blowing ourselves to smithereens, and facing a climate catastrophe.
What a world we live in. What's more, don't look to the future for hope — our youth are disillusioned.
The World Economic Forum's just published Global Risks Report certainly makes dire reading.
COVID-19 has flattened what green shoots of optimism may have existed. As the WEF report says: "It threatens to scale back years of progress on reducing poverty and inequality and to further weaken social cohesion and global cooperation."
Jobs have been lost, people have been isolated, social unrest is rising as we become more politically polarised and global tensions rise.
We can't say we weren't warned. The WEF's 2006 Global Risks Report spelled out exactly this future. Back then, it warned of an acute threat by a flu-like pandemic spread around the world by global travel.
It was forecast then to wreck tourism and manufacturing industries and disrupt global trade. The world didn't listen.
Every nation was caught off guard by the pandemic.
Today, infectious disease remains the most pressing clear and present danger, according to the WEF's latest report.
Looking ahead, extreme weather and climate action failure is the biggest evolving risk. The biggest existential threat over the next decade is the impact of weapons of mass destruction.
The key to the world's future
Buried in the pile of gloom, is something that holds the key to our world's future: the collapse of multilateralism.
COVID has only accelerated this slide.
The so-called global political order is fracturing. During the pandemic, we have retreated behind our borders. Global inequality has increased. We talk more often of war as nations increase defence spending and build more powerful weapons.
The United States unipolar world of the post Cold War has given way to what's been called multipolar arrangement. America no longer calls the shots; it is challenged particularly by China.
Writing in 2018, Kemal Dervis — economist, former head of the UNDP and former vice president of the Brookings Institution — set out three criteria for measuring global power: population size, size of the economy (measured in purchasing power parity), defence spending, and military might.
On that basis, he said the big powers were the US, China, the European Union, Japan, India, Russia, and Brazil.
That marks the erosion of Western dominance (the US and EU aside). Look more closely and while the US remains the most powerful economy and military, it is receding. China, on the other hand, is rapidly increasing.
In 1990, its share of global GDP was less than 2 per cent; by 2017, it was 15 per cent. In 1990, its share of global defence spending was just 1.6 per cent; by 2017, it was nearly 14 per cent.
The big two — China and America — dwarf the others. The world's future is in their hands.
Right now, relations between the two countries are spiralling amid talk of a new Cold War.
Last time, we failed to listen
Multilateralism is not just nation based, it is also institutional: the United Nations, the World Trade Organisation, the World Health Organisation, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, NATO, The OECD, and bodies like the G7 and G20.
Increasingly, those institutions are the site of geopolitical wrangling. China complains the international order is weighted too heavily in favour of Western liberal democracies.
Beijing seeks its own influence through the massive Belt and Road investment and infrastructure project and organisations like the Asia Infrastructure and Investment Bank or the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation that covers 40 per cent of the world population and encompasses more than 20 per cent of global GDP.
The Graduate Institute of Geneva in its 2020 Global Challenges report identified a crisis of multilateralism caught between a global blowback against Western domination and a rising populism eroding liberal democratic values.
The Institute said "multilateralism has become more akin to a faltering hot-air balloon".
Political leaders have been rewarded by putting their nations first. Yet, without a workable global system, what hope is there to deal with a pandemic let alone climate change?
The Graduate Institute of Geneva did see a glimmer of light. The multilateral system it said could be "undergoing a profound mutation." A better system may emerge, one better suited to the complexities of the 21st century.
Better? It would certainly be very different world to the one we have grown accustomed to. The Institute says that may mean the West and democracy "increasingly marginalised."
That's the fault line of our world: autocracy versus democracy.
That's the time bomb buried in the World Economic Forum report. A more volatile, divided world puts us on a potentially devastating collision course.
The WEF warned the world before about impending disaster. The world failed to listen. We spend far too much time looking back. It warns again of the dangers of planning for the last crisis rather than anticipating the next.
Stan Grant presents China Tonight on Monday at 9.35pm on ABC TV, Tuesday at 8pm on ABC News Channel and on iview.