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> Mindset is one of them. Different priorities is another major issue

A big one that people overlook is an individual's ability to recover from a failed attempt.

People who have strong family ties, wealthy families, or other strong support groups, can rebound much more easily than those without.

A lot of people would be better off of they "re-tooled" as you called it. But they literally cannot afford the risk of trying something new in case it doesn't work out.

So many people take for granted their safety nets.

> [...] better off of they "re-tooled" as you called it. But they literally cannot afford the risk [...]

Or to even afford the re-tool. I have a friend who's struggled to find a job for the last few years in the greater LA region; their background is in acting and they don't have a lot of experience in anything to meet the barrier for entry for most decent-if-low-paying white collar work, and they're already underwater in a bunch of ways so they literally can't afford the cost of any training that would open up other opportunities.

I've thought a lot recently about how crap the US is in providing "second tries" in general, and it honestly really scares me. My wife and I are fortunate in that our "first choice" of what to specialize in when we were 18 were things in relatively high demand with decent compensation. (My wife would scoff at this; I work in tech, she's in the veterinary field, and our pay disparity is staggering.) But suppose someone (like my friend) didn't do that, and they made the maybe-reasonable assumption they'd be able to scrape by doing crap work until something better came along? Then comes a pandemic, then comes an insane labor market, then comes spiking inflation and CoL--now they've exhausted their reserves (which, statistically, most Americans have effectively no reserves [1]), their outlook remains bleak, but their back is to the wall.

Yet, the "bootstrap" mentality is what so many people seem to reference when confronted with situations like this; the single parent who went to night classes for months to become an RN, or the janitor that worked their way up to being a department head. These stories abound in the American zeitgeist, but I think it's just an extension of the "just world" fallacy.

[1]: https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/personal-finance/articles/47...

Yes, I completely agree.

I put "cannot afford to try" and "too risky to try" in basically the same bucket, but it's important to note that there is an actual material difference.

The bootstrap mentality is where that difference lies, honestly.

People who can afford to take the risk can sometimes win big and get held up as prime examples of the American Dream survivorship bias in action.

We tend to overlook the ones that fail and are ruined forever. Or the fact that many only did it because risk wasn't very big due to their personal safety nets.

And we absolutely overlook the ones who can't even dream of attempting in the first place because they are too busy just trying to survive.

"Fault" is a tricky word here. Anyone going into teaching minors as a profession cannot be doing it for the money, because at no point in recent history have US teachers been adequately paid, so they knew to some extent what they were getting into. But that certainly doesn't mean they're adequately paid or respected or that we shouldn't fix that.

> have a friend that could have worked on a cutting edge robotics team that stayed home and took a help desk job so he could live with his mom that is 88 years old and struggles to walk.

This is also pretty common. The US healthcare system could help here if it weren't an arbitrarily cruel profit center for billionaires. We need a real social safety net in this country.

> Anyone going into teaching minors as a profession cannot be doing it for the money, because at no point in recent history have US teachers been adequately paid, so they knew to some extent what they were getting into.

Indeed, but the economy is considerably worse now than it was and how observant one is does not seem to be determined by nurture.

The teachers I had in elementary school in central NJ in the 1990s could all afford to lead pretty normal middle class lifestyles. I wouldn't say that they were thriving, but they certainly weren't just barely making ends meet.

I wouldn't think less of a classmate of mine from that time if they went into teaching as a profession thinking it would now provide what it provided then.

Nurses probably are generally underpaid, but they earn well above average wages.

I live in a smallish town in a rural county. There's a couple healthy manufacturers, so not really in a decline. Nurses here earn above the national median household income. The lowest paid might be a bit below.