Perhaps you have some interesting friends, but to me this sounds like it is based in no real-life experience. It's a very stressful job for little reward that leaves you completely depleted at the end of the day to do anything to dig yourself out.

From their perspective, my job is the stressful job. Sure that physically my job is easy but to them my job is stressful because it requires a lot of thinking, not to mention a lot of learning and studying. Its a different kind of stress.

Plenty of people have no desire to apply creative thought or take further responsibility at their workplace. My best friend's boyfriend, for example. Has a university degree, works at a gas station. Was a manager at that gas station, didn't enjoy it, went back to being a team member. Leaves his work at work, checks off the boxes on the checklist while he's there.

He does have the relative security that comes with having a long term partner that does make a professional salary, but I don't think that diminishes the motivational piece. Not everyone is as ambitious as every one else. Of those that are, not everyone's ambition is pointed in the same direction. Some people just want to rock up at work for 8 hours a day, go home, watch some shit TV that they enjoy and then go to bed. Frankly, that's ok. There's not enough programmer/marketing professional/CEO/Founder roles for everyone to have them.