Generally, you're "depressing" folks if you say something like, "You know, you probably will not be wealthy..." How insulting! How dare you! You're a hater. Or, as Ben Stein might have it, an envious loser, for suggesting that. Don't bring me down, yo!
Related, many folks personally don't support unions because that's for underlings and peasant folk, right? They're on their way up, gonna be CEO or the next Andy Warhol or something. Being in a union means throwing in the towel instead of reaching Mt Everest's summit, and they've no desire to settle for mediocrity with the rest of the slobs. That's a bigger obstacle to modern unionization than one might think. Unions are for "other people," dead unambitious souls who've settled for less, random background characters in movies; they're not for me.
-B.
Doug Henwood wrote:
"I think you're an optimist. There's no shortage of publicity about the very rich. There's a voyeuristic, almost pornographic interest in how much they have and how grandly they live. But the lust to expropriate barely comes up. Reverence for money is one of the foundational principles of this country."
Mr. WD wrote:
"If more Americans realized how much money just a handful of people in the U.S. had -- you know, so much they need a shrink to handle it -- I suspect there'd be a lot more support for policies aimed at the redistribution of wealth."