It's both. All humans and all environments are flawed. You can change yourself and control your reactions to your environment if you want to. You can probably also either improve your environment to some extent, or move to a better environment (not always possible for everyone but HN users usually have that option).

There's no need to feel superior: that's not particularly helpful and will tend to give you a distorted perception of reality. Most likely you're just average.

You'll never have an objective measure of good/bad. You only have your feelings on the matter.

One way is to define what you view as good (or better: define what you view as "better") and just be that as much as you can. Because "trying to actually be better" puts you above the median person immediately, IMHO