Some people really believe their own kool-aid. One of my good Chinese buddies always calls himself a slave in a feudal state. Dude owns his own house fully, has a wife and three kids, has land that he plants food on, makes frequent trips into the city to have fun with friends, has a new gaming laptop every year. He works hard, for sure. But he has so many privileges that it hurts to see how down he is on his life. He is basically living “the American dream” already. And like Carlin said, it’s called a dream because you’d have to be asleep to believe it. Sometimes he brings up these migrants as if they’d only come here if they could succeed here. I don’t want to show him this article because it’s just too much for him to handle and I know he’d go off on a rant about China again.