This kind of narrative is just the shadow cast by Horatio Alger fables and it’s marketed to True Believers™ who consider themselves part of the so-called middle class because it creates an ideological justification for the status quo. It’s part of the same phenomenon that makes those “homeless man intervenes to save someone from a car wreck, gets $500,000 to get a home through crowdfunding campaign” stories go completely viral.

These stories tell society that there’s always some money that you can put aside for investment/retirement/a deposit for a home loan, that there’s always a spare hour that you can spend on the side hustle grind, that you can always find time in your day for self-care. The audience that these narratives are aimed at are the people who actually do have spare cash to put aside, who aren’t time poor, who have the energy and the resources to have a side hustle to convince them that the world is essentially just.

Cognito-hazard ahead:

It’s the exact same vibe as this ridiculous infographic.

You could also measure the amount of time the ultra-rich spend in limousines, eating caviar, “networking”, doing coke, wearing designer brands, and ordering the servants around vs the time that poor people spend on public transport, eating cereal, doing unpaid labour, smoking cannabis, wearing non-prestige brand clothing, and taking orders from others but it doesn’t prove shit; no amount of abstaining from reality TV or being driven around by a chauffeur is going to make you rich. These narratives are just a means to reinforce narratives that are inherently classist and it serves to conceal the value-judgments about people who are poor by creating an ideological justification for why someone is poor instead of a materialist analysis of poverty.