"One of the saddest things about all the effort humanity wastes on the categories reviewed above is that there is such an incredible amount of important work to be done in building a sustainable and equitable global society."

You should get to work on that immediately. Excuse me while I pursue my own self-interests just like everyone else. I focus on making the people around me happy, and they in turn do the same for me. I am much more concerned about what happens where I actually live than what happens globally. Society is mostly a bunch of faraway strangers that I don't give a shit about, again just like most people.