I have two thoughts on this: it's important to find contentment regardless of situation, but I would caution against settling for less.

I've noticed that as more and more aspects of the American dream have been stripped of us by the uber-rich in recent decades, a certain kind of fatalism has settled into our collective psyche. There's a sense now that the quiet life is out of reach, regardless of income. That wages will never rise fast enough to keep up with the rising cost of housing. That there are just more and more and more people everywhere, that our heritage is being gentrified. That the hustle and bustle has nearly eclipsed most personal interaction. Basically that the worsening struggle of postmodernism has replaced community, tradition, and so on.

Ironically I had welcomed tech/progress up through the late 1990s, because young people today may not realize how ignorant times were then, when shows like All in the Family may as well have been documentaries. If you watch Saved by the Bell and Napoleon Dynamite, notice how there's no real technology, and there's an impression that the future is coming, but at a glacial pace. It wasn't like today, where if something hasn't been invented yet, it just means you haven't searched hard enough for it on the internet. We still had science instead of manifestation, so nobody told us how much our dreams mattered, only that we should put our noses to the grindstone.

Now in middle age after a lifetime of hard work with little to show for it, I find myself asking what all of this is for. What's the point of tech if it just makes you work harder? Shouldn't it make life easier, and bring more money and resources your way? And I think a lot about people who are good for nothin. Energy vampires who suck the life out of you when you're trying to make progress. They used to be people like me, angstful cynics who pointed out the absurdity of the modern world, who took solace in shows like South Park. Today they're the thought leaders and billionaires who vacuum up all available capital and lobby the government to take away our freedoms. What good are they if they only take but never give?

The key part of the article was unions. You want the quiet life, you've got to organize. This lone wolf, rugged individualist, pull yourself up by your bootstraps dream of winning the internet lottery was a bill of goods. Because winner takes all, and odds are it ain't you. I've been trying for a quarter century and if I knew then what I know now, I never would have started down this road.

I'm shifting my focus to a resource economy where basic necessities are provided by scalable technologies that can't be taken away by concentrated wealth. Where the difference between what employees are billed out for and what they are paid accrues ownership in a business, the same as capital put up by investors. Or that difference is accounted for in tax write-offs, pensions, retirements, social security, and so on. Where job applicants can see that discrepancy in public accounting records and choose not to apply to businesses that exploit them. So that we can all start getting paid what we're worth and build an economic system around improving the human condition instead of feeding off it like vampires.