[majormajor]

Yes and no. On the flip side, you now have the means to have a much more comfortable and pleasant life than the high school dropout classmate you haven't seen in six years.

You have already made it very far, in that sense.

You put effort in, you've gotten rewarded. The washouts from the up-or-out places have lots of soft landing places available compared to most people.

Whether you crash yourself against the rocks of having to be the top of the absolute whole world... that's a personal thing. Being aware of the structure is probably good for informing your decision, but you might've noticed it earlier too.

Other people have gotten rewarded more than you. And this is probably not new to you. There are almost always teacher's pets, spoiled brats whose parents gave them way more than you, beautiful people who get things handed to them for existing, easily-charismatic assholes who coast by or fail upward because everyone likes them, etc. One of the dirty secrets of elite high schools and higher education is already that not everyone worked as hard as you to get there.

[rendaw]

You say no but you're not disagreeing - you're saying that there's enough space in the middle of the pyramid for all the people who didn't drop out of school which AFAICT is orthogonal to GP's point, that there's not enough space at the tip of the pyramid for all the talented people who work very hard.

[MichaelZuo]

There’s obviously can’t be enough space for every moderately above average person who works very hard… since that adds up to tens of millions to hundreds of millions of people across the world.