You're wrong from your very premise. The world isn't going to shit. It's better than it's been at pretty much any time in human history, in almost every facet.
I mean if you focus on the negative and ignore the positive (which is what many people + the media do), you could say it's overall a regressive period. But you could do that (and people have) literally every year for the past 80 years.
Yet, in the grand scheme of things, the world has gotten better in that time. Which is how you know these people are wrong, at least most of the time.
The challenge with positive news is that you have to go seek it out. It will rarely come to you. And then you have to greet it without cynicism, which many are incapable of.
There have always been bumps on the path upward. It's never been smooth. Doesn't change the fact that we're not going to shit, and that we haven't been going to shit for hundreds of years. Quite the opposite.
On average Steven Pinker is at best a fake hyperoptimist-by-aggregate who puts billionaires on pedestals and rewrites history to entrench shitty systems. Sometimes he says smart stuff but he ignores or actively disregards massive problems with a painfully self-serving neutrality.
Yeah I get the pretty much, the car was near the mountain top in the 80s and 90s and "pretty much" flew off a cliff more recently. Sure, we're still alive but everyone is going to die in about 5 seconds.
Drugs are out of control. Homeless are everywhere. No one has interests in anything. No one is having kids. All jobs are going to be gone soon. Colleges can't teach (it's all AI cheating now). People are Gang Robbing stores. Cartels are killing hundreds daily. Fraud is out of control. We have 2 maybe 3 world wars going on simultaneously now. Prices are skyrocketing.
Yeah I get why you say "pretty much". lol PS good luck buying a house