Playing poker professionally is not a retirement, and no one really playing poker for income is addicted, I can assure you (at least not for long).
These days, playing live is the only way to get an edge (correct me? Been a while), and that would be a boring, nauseating job, right around the pay scale and routine of “club bouncer” if you’re good.
I played poker for my sole income for three years after college, traveling the world playing online. It was occasionally a lot of fun, morally painful, so stressful and not very well compensated. I would be rich now if I’d gone straight into programming instead of spending my 20s “avoiding work” by working my ass off to monetize my hobbies.
At peak covid, all the games dried up and even the pros went slumming. I personally saw Phil Ivey at a 2/5 game (!) at the Aria on a random Monday because that was the only game going and he hadn’t had any live practice in quite a long time.
If social was full of people showing off all the stiff they bought with the Nigerian Prince’s money maybe. Seems more like a lottery to me, but even that feels like a poor analogy.
The difference is crypto has made people wealthy, probably with a large luck component and others want in on that.
People just don't go around handing out money. Early Bitcoin miners went through the effort of setting up mining rigs (which is no longer practical for an individual). They actually did something, and had some skin in the game. Did they hang on to those early coins until this year? I have no idea.
But people that just buy into coins because OMG its the next big thing, are purely speculating, which is nothing more than a form of gambling. Do I feel sorry for people with a gambling addiction? Yes I do, and I know someone that 'retired early (35)' to play poker professionally.
To much of the coin and NFT space to me smells of a combination of pyramid scheme and MLM. By its very nature it rejects regulation, it is decentralized. Which is one of the reasons, to me, that it is suspect.