Especially anyone in their 40s or 50s who is close enough to retirement that a career shift is unappealing but far enough from retirement that a layoff now would meaningfully change that timeline or QOL. I don't blame people for feeling uneasy.

I'm probably 7 or 8 years from an easy retirement myself, so I can appreciate how that feels. Nobody really wants to feel disruption at this age, especially when they're the breadwinner for a family.

You either become a foreman operating the machines or a Luddite burning them.

No. By this logic, if they wanted to stay with the times they should have sought capital investment for their own industrial forges, joined their local lodges, climbed the ranks, lobbied their governments for loose safety regulations, and plied their workers with propaganda about how "we're in a recession and have to tighten our belts".

Think of the wonderful world we could have if everyone just got their shit together and became paper trillionaire technocrats.

Some of them feel bad about it and some of them refined metallurgy to build Saturn V rockets and go to space. We are very much living in the new space race. The discussion here is split 50/50 between the “Thank you! I feel the same way” folks and the “I am having the time of my life!” folks.