"that is definitely not true for a large % of the population today"
What you're seeing is rationalization as a defense mechanism. Also bragging about low level jobs is a peculiar form of conspicuous display of wealth for trust fund babies, who are pretty rare outside the largest cities so their behavior is fairly irrelevant on a very large scale (like country wide scale)
Another issue is we have various untrue slogans about everyone having a political voice or everyone being equal under the law, in practice that is strictly financial wealth based, and when wealth is relatively equal the cognitive dissonance is very low and doesn't usually matter very much, but consider the social effects when wealth is very unequal and the sloganeering doesn't pacify the masses anymore.
What you're seeing is rationalization as a defense mechanism. Also bragging about low level jobs is a peculiar form of conspicuous display of wealth for trust fund babies, who are pretty rare outside the largest cities so their behavior is fairly irrelevant on a very large scale (like country wide scale)
Another issue is we have various untrue slogans about everyone having a political voice or everyone being equal under the law, in practice that is strictly financial wealth based, and when wealth is relatively equal the cognitive dissonance is very low and doesn't usually matter very much, but consider the social effects when wealth is very unequal and the sloganeering doesn't pacify the masses anymore.