"Hard work" is the mantra that keeps you a slave. "Success stories" are the tasty carrots that keep you toiling away your best years enriching others in pursuit of the things you're supposed to seek in life: Power, success, status. "Life hacks" are little dopamine hits to keep your eye on the carrot.
And the kicker is that those few who actually do attain these things mistakenly attribute it to their own prowess, when it's mostly luck and circumstance with a smattering of ambition and striking deals in the right networks. They then take it upon themselves to perpetuate the system that now feeds them at your expense.
So you go on toiling away, pushing that wheel around and around for years as your masters feed you stories of their success and a promise of your own one-day-someday, until eventually you hopefully realize the futility of enriching these parasites, and get off their treadmill.
The proletariat are only useful to the rich if they're toiling for them.
Edit: In case you're wondering why this tanked to the bottom of the comments despite being at 38 points after 30 minutes, it's because the admins can artificially drop a comment's priority if they don't like it, and prevent further upvotes (downvotes still work though).