I think you're right that it's widespread beyond consciously selfish people. Most people naturally reproduce whatever behavior seems to be socially rewarded, and some people don't think very hard into it.

For example, in my social group, who as you can imagine are a bunch of well-off privileged people, there is a small but persistent minority of people who complain about ills that plague less privileged people as if they affected them, too. They aren't a minority of the most selfish people; they might be a pious bunch but they're mostly just not thinking.

So I hear complaints about anxiety over employment, from people with Ivy League degrees who could have ten interviews for higher pay lined up within 48 hours if they wanted. And not just acknowledgment of the emotions that everybody feels regardless of privilege, but explicitly linking their anxiety to real economic precarity and political and policy injustices.

Complaints about how difficult it is to pay for health care, from people who have 1% incomes and walk out of a complex surgery owing a few hundred bucks. That's not the health care crisis that people are talking about!

Complaints about exploitative employment, from salaried people who can and do take a few days off whenever they want, for whatever reason they want, and can disappear from work anytime, no matter how awkward the timing, with no questions asked by saying the words "mental health."

These people aren't consciously lying, but they aren't thinking concretely enough to realize that people aren't going to validate and applaud their words like they would if they came out of the mouth of someone less privileged.

I tell them that if privileged people exploit the sensitivity to mental health in the workplace to such a ridiculous degree, there might be a backlash against it before some people even begin to see the benefits. And if people learn to associate "health care crisis" and "food islands" with wealthy people complaining about nearly imperceptible lifestyle compromises, it's going to make it much harder to make progress politically.

But they don't get it. They aren't thinking below the surface. They're just thinking "people sympathize with and applaud these kinds of complaints so I should voice them as well."