@sun yeah no I don't mean it was impossible to be a loser, and maybe you didn't even have to try to be one, either. It's just that more and more people are basically doomed (or stuck following the path of least resistance) to be permanent wageslaves/serfs. You are given the choice to struggle forever until an inevitable medical something or other in your fifties forces you to get government aid or you swallow the poison pill early and welfare queen it up until you die.

Neither option is enviable, but it is vastly more common than it used to be, and many subject to it are better humans that that, left there to rot by people they will never know, who care for them not.

I think I overestimated your age. I consider born in or around 1970 to have been about the cutoff for "normal" being a standard potential outcome for the average person. Someone mid career by the time markets crashed.