Such complacency baffles me.

Part of it, which perhaps you and most other observers are not aware, is that I have enough passive income, and enough dispassion for conventional status signaling, that my marginal utility of money is pretty low compared to my disutility for doing busywork. To put it in perspective, I quit my last regular job in 2002, and stopped doing consulting for that company as well (at $100/hour) a year later when they merged with Microsoft and told me I had to do a bunch of paperwork and be hired by Microsoft's "independent consulting company" in order to continue.

The reason for writing this post was that there seems to be opportunities "out there" for earning up to hundreds of millions of dollars (like the opportunity to mine Bitcoin at version 0.1 that I narrowly missed) while doing very little work. In comparison, doing busywork for a month to earn some unknown amount of money between $0 and $100k is not particularly motivating to me at this point.