As someone coming from a low class family, living in an underdeveloped country, I concentrate my attention on what's positive.
Imagining a glass ceiling will only undermine my efforts and confidence.
If you look around, I am absolutely sure you will find positive things that Canada provided and keeps providing you that 90% of the kids in my country can't even imagine.
Focus on that. Build confidence. Think that you can break this "glass ceiling". It's in your mind, bro.
As about intelligence and hard work, I think it's up to the people around us to judge ourselves and the results of our work. We need to understand others and be useful to them. That's how we can grow.
To me, it seems you have a mindset that is limiting yourself, making you feel sabotaged by others. This prevents you from learning what you need to do in order to improve and grow.
You might not like what I said. I might be wrong. You might ignore it. Anyways, those are the most honest, hard earned 2 cents I can offer.
Did this realistic view provide you with any good results or advances in the aspects you aspire for your life?
If you can objectively convince yourself that yes, with real examples, that's great for you.
If not, maybe this realistic view is just distracting you or undermining your capacity.
For instance, people in first world countries have a lot of advantages over what I have, but I don't care. Occupying my mental capacity with that doesn't help me advance in life.
Instead, I focused on what's positive. For instance: people in first world countries created the internet, published freely available learning resources and open sourced amazing software. With all of that, I learned English (with help of pirated movies/series + subtitles -- published by first world citizens) and taught myself to code. With these skills and a few years of focused work, I now have a standard of living relatively close to a first world middle class family. That's an amazing feat in my social context and I don't care that people in first world countries get that more easily. It doesn't matter to me. Perhaps I'm even happier than they are, because the struggle makes me value even more what I have now.
Could you please elaborate on how you have hit the glass ceiling? I don't know much about workplaces in Canada. I can speak about India: at least in software, class does not play much of a role. Factories and older domains have more rigid hierarchies. Government offices and family-owned businesses are are especially notorious for this. There are other glass ceilings which vary from office to office. For example, smokers or drinkers could form cliques where crucial workplace politics gets discussed. Thankfully, the software industry has been a good equalizer for two reasons. Quite a lot of the bosses have worked in Western environments that were not so obsequious. It's easier for a solo developer to prove himself, especially after the work-from-home trends began.
