As someone who's worked in UI/UX for 2 decades, I feel this too.
Recent developments have made me feel a form of guilt that's new to me. As though we've all had it too good for too long. Which is probably at least in part due to working for organisations that only care about the bottom line.
In short; all of this boils down to capitalism being simultaneously a drive and a drain on society.
What I love about these types of questions is that they come completely out of the blue
Like someone will rock up and ask for some stat that's completely irrelevant to the story, just "to make a point", without looking it up first themselves, just to imply something
And then later backtrack with "I WAS JUST ASKING" or something
Nah, go look it up yourself. Define successful for yourself, look up the statistic
Look for things like "happiest countries in the world", "GDP per capita", "life expectancy" or even "Big Mac index". Heck, make up your own index from a mix of them
This is a problem with how employment works, more than anything.
I've always "hung out" with colleagues after work hours. Because we're all in the same boat, and have more in common with each-other than anyone else, because we spend 40+ hours a week in the same room.
It's a failure of HR and management, imo, when that doesn't happen. And it can be increasingly hard to fix.
Our HR department wouldn't let me give proper feedback. Even though I've had some people that, with a little tweak to their knowledge, or a slight shift in thinking, could become great hires.
There's tonnes of candidates out there that just lack something small, or are slightly less ideal than someone else... yet still have all the raw talent and potential in the world.
But you can't always hire them because you don't have the resources to up-skill them efficiently. Or you need someone that can more readily contribute to a project.
I've certainly got some people in mind whom I'd love to contact as soon as I start at a different employer, to drag them on board if said employer had the resources to properly develop them.
Total tangent. Amazon Prime's video library here in Australia disapointed me to such an extend that I unsubscribed within minutes of subscribing.
The dashboard has recommendations. In those recommendations, on this single page, Twilight appeared 26 (TWENTY SIX) times.
Any other page I'd go to would also have several instances of it recommending me a Twilight movie. I literally couldn't find enough decent movies because almost every other movie was from that series.
It was the shortest lived account I've ever owned.
A third of the world lives in poverty. That's the fault of capitalism.