If you have a narrow optimum that's dragging your whole cost/benefit analysis towards it, and that optimum is externally created and controlled, you too become what's called a slave. A good example is wage slavery.
But perhaps this isn't about the fact that we're optimizers under pressure. Maybe it's better viewed as a problem with the shape of the optimization space. It looks vastly different for rich vs. regular people - the slopes are gentler when you have the means, so you don't have to worry so much about falling into local minima you can't ever escape from.
