If you have a narrow optimum that's dragging your whole cost/benefit analysis towards it, and that optimum is externally created and controlled, you too become what's called a slave. A good example is wage slavery.

But perhaps this isn't about the fact that we're optimizers under pressure. Maybe it's better viewed as a problem with the shape of the optimization space. It looks vastly different for rich vs. regular people - the slopes are gentler when you have the means, so you don't have to worry so much about falling into local minima you can't ever escape from.

Richard Montanez went from janitor to executive at PepsiCo.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/27/a-janitor-invented-flamin-ho...

Survivorship bias.