I would argue that everyone who does not have the means and ability to produce his own food for the year along with a comfortable buffer against a bad crop the following year is essentially stuck in their positions, roles, and in their locations.

Lawyers are licensed by the state they practice in, as are doctors – both of whom are at the top of the income scale as far as people who are actually "productive" go. (It would be trivial to argue against lawyers, and perhaps assign to them a negative net productivity, but for sake of argument, let's say that the work they do helping to define society is a net positive.)

The other people at the top, money-wise, are the C-level executives, who have their own little game going called "board member", whereby you get paid an obscene salary to show up to a catered meeting a handful of times a year because you're known to the group. You occasionally selecting someone else in your social class to lead the company you're supposedly responsible for. As a group, they have the greatest mobility, until they reach the point where they're left holding the bag when the bad quarterly numbers roll in, then their heads roll as easily as a librarian's during a budget crisis.

Many are subject to age discrimination – the obvious example being actresses, used up and spit out as soon as they're no longer the flavor of the week or when someone else is willing to advance to the next level of "daring". However, they're not the only ones – even the engineer, a group whom one would consider to be very mobile and well-compensated, is subject to this, whether by the fashion of whatever's taught in college that half-decade becoming the must-have in the following half, or because they don't fit in with an ever-youthful crowd. Half of engineering graduates have left the field by the time they've reached age fifty. Engineers in Silicon Valley are considered to be of another era by the time they've reached age thirty-five and are as popular and as likely to be hired a mere decade later as a sixty year old woman in a singles bar is to get a date.

With the exception of running off to California or NYC (the one destination exception being Florida for Canadians and Easterners tired of the cold), everyone is expected to stay put where they're planted, perhaps moving over a border or to the local large city for work. Aside from a youthful Rumspringa of gentrifying an inner-city neighborhood, everyone is expected to move to the suburbs, get married, and raise a family. To not do so results in people framing your choices as "selfish".

Constant comparison against your social circle, whether your co-workers, neighbors, or your "friends" on the idiot box combined with the culture of consumption that we live in puts everyone on the merry-go-round of acquisition, disillusionment, and desperation. To question is to stand out and we all know what happens to the proud nail.

Andy