Humankind as Turtles

Don't settle. Any strategy involving settling is a lie. The turtle settled. From its helplessness it evolved to harden a shell which barely mitigates its helplessness from predators. How sad is that? Spending eons of generations perfecting a patchwork defense against infinitely more powerful foes.
But doesn't this sound a little close to home? I imagine all of us have spent huge amounts of time on pathetic little goals with barely a promise of security at the end or as a plain time sink, whilst the grander route, the scariest one of course, sits there waiting on the sideline as a dream for others to take, with much less time and energy that one would expect. And what can you do besides watching them take it, telling yourself it wasn't fore you anyway.
One doesn't need to wait for the next evolutionary step of mankind to be sure that the ones who stay behind will be the weak and the fearful. You know them well, they've spent their whole lives maintaining a little grocery store in your hometown. They're already the turtles. I can picture a distant future robot world, where humans stroll around in their city-sized zoo as cyborg nuclear families watch amused from afar and muse about how quaint the humans are in their primitive ways.
The genome of these zoo people should be fairly identical to all the people you've met, those which you could see clearly the predictable path their life would take into nothing.