Yep. A lot of that stuff about "work hard and get ahead," even for folks with "normal jobs" has just become utter bullshit in the face of horrifically unsound economics and a rigged game financial system/state-manipulated market.
I like your idea about guilds, man. Something I am going to have to play with more in my mind.
I blame government schools a lot for this because children are not taught even basic economics. Then they grow up to be in debt, spend way more than they make, etc. It's a trap that most people blindly walk into. Once in it too, they cannot easily get out. I follow Minority Mindset on YT, and he did a video recently. In it he was explaining that 70% of Americans have something insane like 100K+ debt on average between cars, student loans, and credit cards. That's CRAZY. Those people are basically slaves to their debt and will die as such.