Does it, though? I now make more money off of my T bills than I used to working 70 hour weeks for $30K/year, and my accumulation of cash to plow into T bills was not due to hard work or even particularly large amounts of risk.

In fact, in my case, I accumulated capital in spite of my hard work, not because of it.

Seems your anecdotal experience may be biasing you.

How do you get a high paying job? You identify the requirements and work hard towards them. Did you do that?

You can make $30k/yr making $14.42/hr @ 40 hours a week. Spend the extra 30 skilling up. When you make so little hourly, it doesn't even pay much to work more. Spend that time improving your skills instead.

Average rent:

Seattle: $2334 (almost 30K/year) Boston: $3774 (more than 30K/year) Des Moines, IA: $982 (a significant chunk)

Plus healthcare. Plus utilities. Plus food. On and on. Skilling up won't do much if you're not networking, and that costs time and money too. The bootstraps discussion doesn't work in the real world.

Oh, and don't forget to somehow go out and date, find a partner, and have tons of kids (and pay for them somehow) because as the bootstraps-evangelists point out, we need the labor force and our entire economy is based on an assumption of population growth.

How is networking hard not working hard? How is building a network not "bootstrapping"?

The gist of it is that you have to put in effort. If you put in a lot of effort towards increasing your income over a long period of time, you're almost always going to see signficant results.

COL in Seattle and dating is irrelevant to whether or not putting in more effort tends to increase your income. You're demoralized, we get it.