I think a lot of people are just trying to keep the religion of progress alive without any real material progress and it sort of breaks their mind.

I'm not saying that there's no real technological progress, but it's not a massive material power like it once was, like electric cars are really cool, but they are moving much less people than fossil fuel cars did, and there is no clear path to a future where random 16 year old teenagers are buying electric cars with their summer job in a dinner. So even if there's some technological progress there's a regress in overall capacity.

Or AI can do a lot in the service economy right now, but there's no clear path where AI will get 16 year old teenagers the same mobility as the gas car did. There's still hopes of AGI but that's still more faith than a clear A->B->C path that we are threading. A lot of people just experience it as enshittification, though that was already going on before AI, not trying to blame it.