I find remarks like GP useful, to put into perspective just how mind-boggingly unfair life is. This is a different frame of thinking ("headspace") than a self-improvement seeker is in, which explains the downvotes and the "boo"ing.
Imagine a civil engineer walks into the office and asks a colleague about the plans for the new housing project, and the colleague replies that the concept of a "house" is a rich and socially constructed idea that both reflects and influnces the social zeitgeist in subtle ways and is intimately tied to notions of community and private property. They are not wrong, and the civil engineer would probably learn new things if they let the colleague finish instead of laughing them off or firing them, it's just that there is this implicit shared context in the workplace, that "house" is not a subtle idea and our job is to plan and build them not talk about their history or philosophy, that the colleague is violating or ignoring.
This is a useful analogy to understand why a remark like GP's, very useful and very true and would drive you into despairing madness and perhaps the brink of suicide if you think about it honestly and deeply, is not welcome in a thread like this. There is an implicit context in the comment section (formed haphazardly in a distributed non-explicit way, unlike that of the analogy) that you have a bunch of latent opportunities that you can take for granted and build off them to new frontiers, and that those opportunities are more or less a "critical mass", you can make them into whatever outcome you want given a fair amount of work. This is non-trivial for a huge portion of humans, and yet the self-help context always assumes it without proof, and any pushback is interpreted as doomer nay-saying or unhelpful pedantry.
Imagine a civil engineer walks into the office and asks a colleague about the plans for the new housing project, and the colleague replies that the concept of a "house" is a rich and socially constructed idea that both reflects and influnces the social zeitgeist in subtle ways and is intimately tied to notions of community and private property. They are not wrong, and the civil engineer would probably learn new things if they let the colleague finish instead of laughing them off or firing them, it's just that there is this implicit shared context in the workplace, that "house" is not a subtle idea and our job is to plan and build them not talk about their history or philosophy, that the colleague is violating or ignoring.
This is a useful analogy to understand why a remark like GP's, very useful and very true and would drive you into despairing madness and perhaps the brink of suicide if you think about it honestly and deeply, is not welcome in a thread like this. There is an implicit context in the comment section (formed haphazardly in a distributed non-explicit way, unlike that of the analogy) that you have a bunch of latent opportunities that you can take for granted and build off them to new frontiers, and that those opportunities are more or less a "critical mass", you can make them into whatever outcome you want given a fair amount of work. This is non-trivial for a huge portion of humans, and yet the self-help context always assumes it without proof, and any pushback is interpreted as doomer nay-saying or unhelpful pedantry.