When Did “Difficult” Become “Impossible”?

In another thread I said that $100k would not support my lifestyle, and it got downvoted.

That part interested me. But another part of the discussion interested me even more. There were also people arguing that becoming a millionaire through saving and compounding is basically a pipe dream now.

Now to be fair, I think younger people today absolutely face some real economic headwinds:
- housing costs relative to income
- education costs
- inflation
- lifestyle expectations
- social pressure amplified by the internet

But I also think there’s been a cultural shift from:
“This is difficult” to “This is impossible.”

And those are radically different mindsets.

Compounding especially is weird because it feels fake in the beginning. The first decade often looks painfully slow. That’s why so many people quit before the math ever starts working in their favor.

It reminds me of planting an oak tree. For years, it barely seems to grow at all. You water it, protect it, and wait while people laugh at the tiny stick in your yard. Then one day, twenty years later, people suddenly say:
“Must be nice to have a giant oak tree.”

What they didn’t see was the decades.

I’m not saying everybody becomes wealthy. Obviously they don’t. Life happens. Some people get terrible breaks. But I do think a dangerous mindset has emerged where people increasingly treat long-term financial success as fantasy instead of something difficult but achievable.

That mindset may be more damaging than inflation itself.