All of life is a scam
If you think about it, we're scammed our entire lives because it never occurs to our parents that nothing in our life is guaranteed (either that, or they don't dare explain that to us).
We're constantly told by people older than us, who should have known better by then, that certain things are the case when they are simply not. We're scammed into adopting the principles of some religion. We're told that if we work hard, we can have what we want out of life. Incidentally, we're told that value, and hence wealth acquisition, is coupled to hard work, when in fact it is coupled to scarcity. It's not that if you work hard you will become wealthy, it's that if you work hard to come into possession of something scarce, you could then become wealthy. Not everyone is capable of that.
We're told, and it is assumed of us, that we will be able to have a partner, a family, and be happy. Actually, not everyone can have a partner, for various reasons. Some people are incapable of making a relationship last, due to their own personal faults. Some are mentally ill. Some accidentally have children with a partner who turns out to be mentally ill. Some small percentage of people are too inadequate to be accepted by anyone else.
Even if you're lucky - you have good genes, a good middle class life, and so on - you might still get drafted and killed in a useless war.
We all know this. My point is that we're all constantly being scammed into believing that these things absolutely will be otherwise, when many of them will not. We get lied to by our parents, our teachers, and our elders in general, our entire lives.
When I was a young kid, middle aged women would joke that I would have girls flocking to me when I'm older lol. That never materialize. I'm not mad about it. It's not this one thing in particular that matters. It's just one example of the many ways in which older people mislead us.
Maybe that's a better way of putting it. It's not that older people are deliberately scamming us into believing that certain, optimistic, things will come true. It's that they mislead us into thinking that they will come true. Why? Well, I'm guessing, either because they have been especially lucky in their own lives, and they don't realize how much of an outlier they are, or because they don't dare tell us the truth.
We're also scammed by our hormones most of the time to want to have sex so that more humans can be created, even when we do not want children. Hence most people will "fall in love" with the wrong person just because of this little cruel trick of nature
