We came close with COVID, but literally the businesses of the world fucking rejoiced that we avoided a Black Plague scenario where enough people died that workers were able to demand better wages. They were so happy it mostly affected old people, because that meant they could just pile those old non-money-makers into wood chippers while they would lean on the able bodied workers dwindling health's.

You can see it in how it went from "essential workers are heroes!" back to "you should be happy to have a job, I could replace you with anybody in an instant!" pretty much overnight in early 2023.

As fucked up as it is, if more young, able bodied people would have died, the people that were left would have been in a better bargaining position.

On the plus side, millennials aren't having fucking babies so we're killing this fucking sick system one way or another by showing how it's a fucking pyramid scheme that benefits the already-wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

When they won't have enough workers to keep pushing exponential "growth" each year, this whole fucking kit and caboodle will fall apart. Especially when the workers start actually demanding to have their real human lives back.

Even worse, climate change will probably kick all of our asses far before that's even possible.

As sad as it is, the last thing that could change things will be the thing that changes them so far for the worse that forward movement will be nearly impossible and society as we know it will likely fail.

Capitalism (depending on how you define it) is coming up on 600 years soon. That's usually the point at which systems start to break and new ones emerge. Unfortunately, if you're a fan of Marx you'll be aware of his theory that cycles of power relations and exploitation tend to reproduce themselves within these new systems - unless that cycle is broken.

Sounds like this might rectified soon, then.