We live in a world with a better average, but a worse median. In other words, a more unequal world. There are billions of people competing on a fully discovered, highly developed, and globalized world.
The world being fully discovered means that exploration is no longer an option for generating value. Almost every domain of ownership is zero-sum: you can only win at someone else's expense. Gone are the days when men could take on the risk of exploration to capture virgin forest or untapped oil fields.
Technology being highly developed means that making new discoveries is no longer an option for most people. So much knowledge has already been catalogued (and patented) that even a person of great ability would need decades of training to produce further research. Newton and Gottlieb invented calculus and Einstein described relativity; the names of men of equal ability, but who came after, will be forgotten.
Globalization means that being a local champion at a craft is worthless; it's winner-take-all and there's only one winner on the whole planet. Vonnegut said it best in Bluebeard. In the sexual marketplace, of course, we recognize this phenomenon as Chad and giga-Chad. The long-term effect of online dating, better described as "globalized dating", was to give the the most attractive male in any radius mating access unrestricted by anything except sheer nightly logistics, while depriving every other male in that radius of all mating opportunities.
Vonnegut quote:
"...simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world’s champions."
