The availability of opportunity itself has diminished. Fewer and fewer opportunities are made available by those who hold the keys to the gates. Often, when one of the now fewer gates to opportunity open, much less is offered inside than was historically there and the risks to benefits to open those doors is increasing across the board.
I'd say it's too simplistic to imply people don't seek opportunity because it requires work, it's more to do with the fact the success rates are so low and the magnitude of work is so high now compared historically that most would rather seek other ways to add enjoyment to their lives and abandon the system.
That's not sustainable for our society to continue to be successful and it has to change back to more sane thresholds. Implying people are lazy is a copout to the real problem.
Older opportunities only looked easy because they'd be easy for us in our more powerful position of knowledge and resources. It wasn't easy for an uneducated medieval peasant to discover the laws of electromagnetism. Even the most advantaged people didn't know what to look for. Plenty of failures happened in alchemy/witchcraft/religion/etc. that people dedicated their lives to for nothing because they didn't have our advantage of knowledge.
> Opportunity is often missed because it looks like work.
Man that is 180 degrees from my perception. Opportunity is often declined because a failed inventor (and most inventors fail) looks like someone who got nothing done. It looks like non-work.
Upper-middle class westerners can get away with this, because they've got enough capital to weather the period of speculative effort, and when it fails, they've got enough connections to get paid employment afterward.
A poorly capitalized, poorly connected person who messes around in a shed for two years and produces a pile of non-functional junk has a much harder time getting back into the game afterward, and they know this going in.
Good businessmen all have more failed businesses that successful ones. There is zero shame for failing a buisness, although quite a bit for fumbling your personal finances.
