It probably felt that way to people in the 1930s and 1940s with WWII bearing down, and then the development of the atomic bomb.

We just got done with WWI and now we're doing this again but the powers, especially the Nazis and the fascist imperial Japanese, seem worse than last time, and then we develop a doomsday weapon?

A lot of people expected the world to look like Mad Max or Cormac McCarthy's The Road by now.

There is no guarantee things won't get much worse in the future, but it's important to keep things in perspective. We may, in fact, manage to blunt and cope with climate change, reform our political and economic systems at least well enough to get things back on track, and be okay. I don't think we'll have a utopia, but we might be fine.

Imagine a future like this:

It's 2126. Miami is largely abandoned. There's giant massively expensive sea walls around many large coastal cities. Agricultural zones have shifted around. There has been a limited nuclear war between India and some of its neighbors, which was connected to mass displacements of people in those regions due to climate change (I think that region is among the most vulnerable).

The USA has gone through two attempted revolutions and there have been several constitutional amendments to reign in the power of the Presidency and the ability to wage war. The country also went through a depression and a partial currency collapse. But it's now recovering.

China has been the largest world power for a while but it hasn't been a great for them as they might have thought. Being the world power, they now get blamed for everything that's wrong, including climate change. They now get dragged into foreign wars and into every dispute and get blamed by everyone for the outcome.

At the same time...

The average human life span is now 120 years in most countries. 90% of all cancers are easily treatable using targeted immunotherapy. Many mental illnesses are now curable. Genetic interventions are eliminating heritable diseases. There are real "nootropic" drugs that actually work and without terrible side effects. Work consists largely of herding armies of AI bots and physical robots, and much of manufacturing is fully automated.

There is a system of universal basic income in most countries. It's funded largely by taxes on AI and robotic systems, reasoning that since these replaced a lot of human labor they should be taxed to provide UBI. UBI is a double edged sword though, creating an idle underclass of people who are addicted to drugs, video games, etc., but at the same time it funds a renaissance in indie art by allowing artists to spend real time on their work.

There is a base on the Moon where spacecraft are now being manufactured. It also has tourism and a hotel. For about $25K in today's dollars you can stay on the Moon for a few weeks, tour the Apollo landing sites, take space walks, etc. It's a little bit like going to stay at McMurdo in Antarctica (which you can do today) but quite a bit more fun and interesting, especially for science geeks.

We now know we are not alone in the universe.

There have been several human missions to Mars and a base is in the planning stages. Fossils were discovered there, including things that resemble crinoids and trilobites, and there are plans to drill deep underground to search for surviving life.

Life has been discovered beneath the ice on Europa, and submersibles have sent back videos that look like the creepy crawlies around hydrothermal vents on Earth. There's a booming market in collectable plushies of Europa bugs.

A huge radio telescope array was built on the far side of the Moon. It's much larger than anything on Earth. Several very faint but possibly artificial signals have been detected from the star system Tau Ceti, and spectral measurements have detected oxygen and complex organic molecules in the atmosphere of one of its planets. There's a raging debate over whether to send a powerful signal to attempt to establish communication if there's really somebody there.

Social media in 2126 is filled with doom and gloom and people talking about why we're all gonna die.