Self-improvement

Any species is limited by its capacity to evolve, one gene at a time over a whole generation, repeated again and again. Except humans.

Early on, like every other species, we were resource-constrained by nature: not enough food could grow in a single place to support a whole civilization.
One day, we took control of that through agriculture: survival was finally assured over longer stretches of time, without needing to hunt or gather food each day just to make it to the next.

That first shift created a cascade of progress that played out over centuries and eventually led us to a world where 99% of humans can now pretty much plan their whole life early on and get to the end without much suffering (and increased life expectancy is a good metric that shows this).

Fast forward a bit, and a lot of us do not really know what to do with our lives when we can see every possibility across a screen: if you know every possibility you can access (and the more time passes, the more possibilities one has), a particular choice might not be as interesting as it once was because the stakes are not as high as they were historically.

Now, throw resource abundance into the mix, as some predict for the future, and you get pretty much a life without requirements: you do not need to contribute to society because it costs society marginally nothing to keep you alive.

Any individual can now choose what to do, and I believe many will choose to be a better human.
That goal is moving, and that is by design; there is always something to improve.

We see this play out over the last few decades: people want to help others more (globalization helps a lot with this, though not everyone agrees on which “others” count, and that is fine) and/or improve themselves.

Both the mind and the flesh are targeted: from traveling to open up to other cultures and see the world, to pushing your body with sports.

Businesses are flourishing in those domains, which can only be explained by people wanting those things.
We are still early, but I believe the 21st century will be defined by personal self-improvement in the history books of the future.