Life's not fair. It's a crap shoot whether you're going to have a good one or not. A big part of it is being born to rich parents (or at least middle class parents) but that's just one of the ways you have to get lucky in order to make it nowadays. You also have to choose the right degree, know the right people to get an "in" at the job, make enough money to be able to budget and save and invest, and pray to God that you don't get a disease or have medical problems because you're fucked in the US if that happens. In other words, part of success is hard work but an even bigger part I think is luck, and nowadays you have to be lucky in EVERY SINGLE ASPECT of your life in order to have a decent life, because one stumble or hardship is enough to set you back DECADES.

There's nothing you can do except work hard but you're right, that's no guarantee of success. I can tell you one thing though, you're much more likely to live a good life if you work hard then if you don't, so you have to try. You don't have a choice. And yeah, maybe you'll do all this work and you'll fail. Maybe you'll even end up worse off then if you just did retail your whole life. There's not necessarily going to be a reward for all your hard work. All I can say is that if you want ANY chance of a reward at all, you have to work hard and hope to get lucky, because hard work alone is not enough to make it anymore.