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This has nothing to do with how many other people can do it. It's reasonable for, for instance, someone with some physical disability to be as proud at completing a comparatively short run as someone else is at finishing an ultra-marathon, if equal effort was demanded of them. If swimming suddenly and totally fell out of fashion as a thing to learn recreationally, such that fewer people could swim at all than had a PhD, that would not then imply that if I went off and learnt to swim to a bronze certificate standard it would be an achievement to be proud of.
Why wouldn't it? If the cachet of a PhD is that it is something relatively few people can do, then being able to swim to certificate standard when that is rarer than having a PhD is something relatively few people can do, and so is something to be proud of.
If everyone gets a PhD with their box of cornflakes, is that an achievement to be proud of?
The cachet of a PhD might be that, but that doesn't mean that's why one ought to be proud of it. It's only correlated. You should be proud of it because it's hard, and not many people can do it because it is hard. But you shouldn't be proud of it because not many people do it, that's getting the chain of causation the wrong way round. Hence;
No, but not because everyone has one, but because you didn't have to do anything to get it. Which again are correlated - everyone has one because it comes with their cornflakes - but not the same thing.
Here's a perhaps clearer example. If I decided to learn to a very basic level some conversational phrases in an ultra-obscure language for a couple of hours, that would already get me to a level of knowledge rarer in the the general population than having a PhD. But that obviously doesn't mean that I should be prouder of the former than the latter, if for instance I had both.
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