I am keen to enlist your help in a matter of unparalleled importance for the advance of human civilisation – and we begin with an encouraging precedent. There was a more benighted time when the phrase "Do you know who I am?" could be deployed almost without risk, as the terminally indulged pulled rank.

But, thanks to progress, that inquiry is now a joke. It is an idiot klaxon. It is a byphrase for self-delusion on a comical scale. Of course, it is still used by some, but its mere utterance is now automatically deemed something worthy of reporting, and in the most disparaging of terms.

And so to the affectation for which I wish we could do the same. My dream is of a world where every time someone whose income is in excess of several million a year claims publicly that "nobody works harder" than them, some sort of ridicule siren goes off across every part of the globe that has the luxury of a few minutes to read such cobblers. The same would go for all variants on the statement, spouted with unchallenged frequency by so many people in western public life – the suggestion that they are always working, or that their work is incredibly exhausting.

If remote life forms were only to have access to our media to gain a sense of life on Earth, they would not think the hardest jobs on the planet were occupations such as logging, or oil well drilling, or mining, or demining, or hazmat diving. They would assume they must be gigs such as acting, running billion-dollar businesses, and being a prince.

It's just a hunch, but something tells me that when a Filipino fisherman – described by one United Nations report as "among the poorest of the poor" – knocks off an 18-hour shift in almost unimaginably backbreaking conditions and returns to his shack, he does not take the time to observe self-admiringly that no one works harder than him. His wife is rather too busy with the other half of the impossible balancing act that is their hardscrabble existence to explain indulgently to others that she does rather wish he'd relax.

Yet back in the real world, or rather the place that does not have to bear very much reality at all, the past few days have yielded the usual spread of self-effacing hard grafters. Prince Charles is always "working, working, working", opined his wife, Camilla, of the man who famously went into a decline at the loss of a particular butler because he missed the way he squeezed the toothpaste on to the royal toothbrush. "He never, ever stops working. No matter what the day, he is always working."

Then there was leaked testimony from Tom Cruise's lawsuit against a US magazine publisher, in which the actor is questioned on his attorney's claims that location shoots for which he was required to be separated from his daughter were akin to being deployed to Afghanistan. "That's what it feels like. And certainly, on this last movie, it was brutal." Physically, in fact, it sounds like even harder work than six months fannying about in the Helmand minefields. "A sprinter for the Olympics, they only have to run two races a day," explains Cruise. "When I'm shooting, I could potentially have to run 30, 40 races a day, day after day."

If only the gangmasters paid him more than $25m a movie, perhaps he could escape the cycle of despair. In the meantime, we might agree that work as understood by the Charleses and Toms is not work as it is understood by the vast majority of the world's population.

A useful rule of thumb is that anyone who might ever be in a position to grant an interview on their amazing workload doesn't know the half of it. Compared to most of the planet, many of us don't know the half of it – certainly not someone like me, whose job is arseing about with a keyboard. (Hardest game in the world, typing.) But the first step to anything approaching perspective is surely the realisation that you don't know the half of it, followed in short order by the realisation that the very least you can do – given that you have won first prize in the lottery of life – is to shut up forever about how hard you toil.

A couple of weeks ago it was Sting, claiming his wife, Trudie Styler, "works harder than anyone I know". Perhaps he really does think his missus knackers herself more than the embattled indigenous populations he's supposed to have spent so much time with. But does she work harder than Gerard Butler? "There's no one in this world I think that works harder than me," declared that actor earlier this year, when a more accurate reflection might be, "I've spent 30 seconds thinking about it and I reckon I work harder than Nicolas Cage."

Of course, these latter few are celebrities, and we know that actors say the silliest things – in fact, we mostly want them to. But there is a difference between enjoying the lunacy and letting such lunatic declarations become the norm – which they now are, from supermodels to CEOs. The unthinking way in which claims of hard graft pepper so many immensely privileged people's public verdicts on themselves indicates how stunningly, depressingly out of whack is their perspective on the world, a world they have far more power to change than the truly exhausted ever will.

Twitter: @MarinaHyde