I told this joke at my father's funeral. He grew up poor but he had a different mindset and I think it speaks to his character and what he instilled in me:

"A successful business man from New York goes on vacation in a Mexican seaside town. He takes a walk down to the beach mid morning and sees a fisherman coming in with his catch. 'Wow, those are some beautiful fish. Tell me, what will you do the rest of the day?'

The fisherman replies, 'I will take my fish to the market, go home and take a nap, have lunch, play with my children for a bit, then go into town and drink wine and play music with my friends, and finally go home in the evening and make love to my wife.'

The business man replies, 'But if you stayed out all day catching fish you could make far more money!'

The fisherman says, 'well, then what?'

'You could buy another boat and hire some of the young men in town to fish for you and then start making an even bigger profit!'

The fisherman says, 'well, then what?'

'You could open a cannery by the dock and process the fish to be packaged and sold to other cities in other markets and make even more money!'

The fisherman says, 'well, then what?'

'You could retire to a small seaside town, do a little fishing in the morning, go home and take a nap, play with your children, play music with your friends, drink some wine, and go home to make love to your wife.'

Yeah it's a nice and pleasant story, assuming you've never actually met or seen the working or living conditions that most of the fisherman in your story actually live in and the terrible toll it takes on their body.

Those fisherman in your story die at a conservative rate of about 30,000 per year [1], and that's just from drowning. There are villages in the very Mexico your joke makes fun of with large populations of paralyzed thirty year olds due to spine injuries or untreatable permanent muscle pain, rates of skin cancer three times higher than indoor workers and eyes wrecked from clouded corneas and cataracts due to years of glare coming off the water.

And that's the physical toll on fishermen, there's also the economic burden of the fact that the guys actually doing the fishing don't own their boats are in an almost perpetual debt to middleman, which is why fisher "men" often also have to include their wives and kids in the occupation to help out... and of course since there's no insurance, if one of them dies the household's income goes to zero that same afternoon.

But yeah man... nice joke... I'm sure it really instilled a great sense of moral character in you.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03085...

This sounds great until a businessman arrives with a trawler, takes all of the fish, and buys all of the land in your town.