Really? I guess it likely depends on what age they die at. If you're a 40-year-old guy with a wife and 2 teenagers, and you are dying from cancer, your family is probably going to be left in a much more precarious situation financially if you don't have a large life insurance policy, or a large amount of savings, than if you were a 75-year-old guy who dies with two adult-children, a paid-off house, car, and a wife that receives social security benefits. If you are the 40-year-old, I think you'd be feeling pretty lousy about leaving your family to fend for itself without your financial help going forward. If you're the latter, you know everything is as stable as can be.
Piggybacking on your point about the general public: historically something like 25 to 30 percent of people don't even know who the Vice President of the United States is...and this goes back to at least the 70s. Simply asking someone if they know who Snowden is doesn't really prove much. What percentage of people will just lie and say they know?
About those automated drinks at McDonalds...when I order mine with 'no ice,' the machine is apparently incapable of filling the cup with the additional amount of coke that would normally be displaced by ice. It will simply fill the cup just 2/3 of the way. They seem to have realized this though, but instead of increasing the volume of coke dispensed, the machine drops ANOTHER cup which the employee is supposed to use to fill the actual cup to the top. The employees only do this half the time, however, which makes the entire process even more maddening. Somehow neither man, nor machine, can get a no-ice drink right at McDonalds.
That is because those machines are made in a way to mix the 'perfect' ratio of water + syrup. They take in account the ice as well. If the cup is 0.5l, it plans to be 0.4l of liquid + 0.1l of ice (random values), so if you chose no ice, you get 0.4l since that is the 'perfect' ratio. (And probably what they advertise ie '0.4l coke = 1 euro' or whatever, they just give a 0.5l cup to account for ice)
...and imagine if the moonlighting software devs were only getting paid what the warehouse workers were receiving, instead of their normal developer pay.. the work becomes a lot "harder" / more thankless when your pay is 1/3 or 1/4 as much.
Add on the stress of wondering where your next meal is coming from, or how you're going to pay rent this month... every day, for the rest of your life, and your quality of life sinks dramatically.
Yeah this stuff literally changes your life in pretty much every aspect. I have personally observed the shift in peoples' way of living and thinking as they move from one financial situation to another, whether upward or downward. I try to regularly reflect on my situation and recognize how comparatively lucky I am to be in the position I am in, and how it's never "set in stone".
I've been in a weird variant of that for 16 years: I've had crippling anxiety that today might be the day that my computer dies. Try as I might, I cannot shake it - because it's not an irrational fear.
I simply look at eBay and see the $200-$400 price tags to replace my current machine (10-year old ThinkPad T400) and try not to cry. (This one was given to me by a friend)
I found an 800MHz AMD Duron with 128MB RAM on the side of the road in 2013. Browsing the web on that box was fun, even after maxing out the RAM with everything in the house and getting it up to 320MB.
In 2005 I was running a 66MHz 486DX2 with 8MB of free diskspace (oh and 4MB RAM).
The outlier was the Pentium 4 I used for a bit in 2006 - it had a crippled motherboard that couldn't do DMA to the HDD, only PIO, so the cursor would freeze if anything was accessing the HDD even for a fraction of a second. This was the Firefox 2.x era, so with 512MB of RAM I was mostly staring at "Task Manager (Not Responding)" instead of doing anything useful.
My point with all this: it has taken me about 20 years to realize that my general lack of success at mastering computer science wasn't entirely due to the learning difficulties and other mental health issues preventing me from holding down a traditional job - it was access to sane equipment.
I have had the ABSOLUTE HARDEST TIME EVER (emphasis appropriate and necessary) to FORCE myself to do ANYTHING with computers beyond what I'd describe "theoretical learning". "But what if I start this project and the computer dies tomorrow?????" is what a part of my head sort of screams/cries out anytime I have a new idea (with that many anxious questionmarks).
Unresolvable problem, currently. And an interesting one, too, since if I _could_ start a project, and hold it together, I might actually be able to get somewhere and move up.
...Except for the fact that the disability support I'm currently eligible for only recognizes casual/part time work payment structures, not bulk post-payment consulting/bug-bounty up-front types of remuneration, which is the type of thing I have any confidence in my abilities with. (Since I can cram and do the work in a sprint, then run away and have a break for a million years afterwards.)
So yeah, I am practically disabled because of how my mental health issues are classified, not directly because of the issues themselves (which have an impact but do leave me with some level of functionality which I am unable to effectively use).
Please don't discount the fact that--despite popular perception--economic mobility in America is much smaller than in most developed countries. Your rags-to-riches success (while wonderful) is a statistical outlier. The vast majority of studies bear this out. What one starts with (parents' income/wealth) has a massive impact on what one finishes with.
