It sounds like you got lucky in being able to survive restaurant work and being able to manage surviving in the post-gentrification bay area. Most people are not so lucky.

To be fair, I don’t have statistics, and we don’t track how many people do morally odious work despite their own ethics because it pays the bills. But we do account for the high numbers of people who tolerate harassment and sexual assault, who tolerate toxic work environments because they need the compensation to eat and pay rent.

If it helps, morally questionable work does tend to have a high-turnover rate, akin to drone operators in the US military and CIA drone strike programs and the Einsatzgrupen of the German Reich. We humans really do lose sleep over doing work that is linked to massacres.

As per all things, life in deteriorating societies can be very challenging, to the point that suicides and rampage killings (which are, more or less, angry suicides) occur at conspicuously elevated levels. But some people are going to club seals sooner than succumbing to their own misery in hopes they can survive long enough they no longer have to club seals to sustain themselves.