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I'm certainly staying put even if they started taking recruits for the Mars colony tomorrow. But I don't mind taking the office job route you talked about, and I plan to get engaged soon. The pot is sweet enough in America that you can just coast if you're a certain type. That said:
Come on. This is not trivially easy. It's easy if you have a high enough IQ and can put up with school and office life for 80% of your life. Even if we're talking about email jobs, that still selects for a certain level of agreeableness and conscientiousness. There are many people who simply lack the cognitive horsepower for this kind of work, and there's a large group of people for whom this is a living hell. I don't mind the work, but you must agree the modal office environment is very feminine.
My college friends are all capable of and okay with this route, but I have a lot of other friends from different backgrounds that this is not a viable path for. In any society, there will be people unhappy with the current order, but the rising trend in sexlessness and radicalism indicates that there are more unsatisfied people than normal right now. If there were a compelling alternative path, I think there'd be a lot less societal stress from men with unfulfilling lives.
Yeah that's a fantasy, and there are many good arguments for why space can't be the escape valve for those people, but my point was that such space aspirations were a frontier fantasy, not a utopian fantasy as OP was saying.
Their earnings potential was much better in America, no? That's why they came. They wouldn't die rich by the standards of landed European money, but they'd be wealthier than they ever would have been had they stayed in Europe. There was a legitimate reason to go, because there was a lot of "unclaimed" land and opportunity to die with some land and money, not a landless serf.
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