I think in the western world there is a lot of pressure and influence to try and make as much money as possible and live as comfortably as possible. I think you have to have a healthly balance. You don't need to be a cuthroat sociopath to make a good living wage, but you also need to have enough common sense and foresight to not do something silly which won't provide for your family.

But how did someone so full of himself get assigned to the seminary?

Probably his education and IQ. His brainpower was never an issue.

Also remember he "got in on the ground floor" of the SSPX. Seniority-wise, he's got to be pretty close to the top. Especially *for his age*.

When he was 25 and ordained (I don't remember exactly when he was ordained -- it might have been 24), there weren't many other priests to choose from. Today, a young priest of 25 would be just one of 600+, and there would be PLENTY of priests older, more talented, and more experienced to steal the limelight -- if the limelight was something being sought, of course.

Just like it's harder to become a bitcoin, real estate, or stock market millionaire, than if you started in the 1980's. By today, everything is so inflated, it's difficult (and highly risky) to make huge gains. 

The SSPX is so much more established now than in the 1990's, for example.

I know there have been quite a few threads on careers for Trad Cat men, and that in the past the trades were recommended, but even with the trades I see a massive push to give those jobs to women and minorities. I met a young woman at a chapel a while ago who came to Ireland to train as an electrician as the salaries for women were so high in Ireland as companies were so eager to employ them. Our government recently launched a five year plan to dramatically increase the number of women and minorities in trades. They want to remove all ability for a normal man to support himself and a family. 

I have attended interviews for white-collar jobs where I was told that a key characteristic they were looking for in candidates was for them to be women or minorities. I'm grateful I have a job (modest salary) and I consider every euro I earn a miracle as I know a large section of society wishes me to be unemployed and homeless.

I know there have been quite a few threads on careers for Trad Cat men, and that in the past the trades were recommended, but even with the trades I see a massive push to give those jobs to women and minorities. I met a young woman at a chapel a while ago who came to Ireland to train as an electrician as the salaries for women were so high in Ireland as companies were so eager to employ them. Our government recently launched a five year plan to dramatically increase the number of women and minorities in trades. They want to remove all ability for a normal man to support himself and a family.

I have attended interviews for white-collar jobs where I was told that a key characteristic they were looking for in candidates was for them to be women or minorities. I'm grateful I have a job (modest salary) and I consider every euro I earn a miracle as I know a large section of society wishes me to be unemployed and homeless.

I'm assuming this is in Ireland, judging from your screen name and reference to euros?

In the US, they cannot come out and tell you what kind of demographic they're looking for, but sometimes it's fairly obvious.  At the firm where I worked for almost 20 years before I retired, staff and middle management was almost exclusively women, and this was not some sort of "women-owned firm", it was a large Southern privately-held financial-sector firm, very hidebound, very traditional, they even had someone to say grace before potlucks.  There seems to be the unspoken prejudice that men are unsuited to indoor work, that they are fidgety, noisy, and need to be working out in the hot sun, or in dirty, sweaty, largely manual labor, while the wives have the "good indoor jobs" with health insurance and so on.  It's really a kind of unspoken, accidental, possibly not even fully conscious, "steel magnolia feminism".  I've lived here almost a quarter of a century and I've never figured it out.  It seems as though here, the men are either lawyers and doctors, or electricians and plumbers (who, one must concede, can make fine money).

I would also add, possibly in partial defense of the priest in the OP, that traditional Catholic women (many of them, anyway) have huge expectations of their future husbands.  Ideally, they want to know that they will be supported, in a relatively easy lifestyle, without having to work outside of the home, while having very large families.  In today's economy, that's a high bar.  Gone are the days when a man with a high school diploma and a strong work ethic could just go down to the mill or someplace, bust his hump for life, and make enough money to support a fairly good-sized family without his wife having to go out and work.  And in that you could trust the schools back then (though in public schools, culturally Protestant and quasi-Masonic indoctrination was always "there" in some fashion), the need to homeschool, even if it had been allowed, just wasn't there. 

A man contemplating marriage is under pressure to be "the best of the best", because if he can only get some kind of menial job, his future will consist of lifelong involuntary celibacy --- either that, or marry an apostate woman who will use contraception (or sterilization when she sees her family as "complete" and concludes that she's "been blessed"), and better to stay single, than to live in mortal sin.  But I would also add, that if a woman doesn't have much to "bring to the table" herself --- disagreeable personality, laziness, issues of aesthetics and/or physique (the crude term is "butterface", viz., everything about her is appealing "but-her-face"), and so on --- she might find herself in perpetual spinsterhood, and some of them are okay with that --- "if I can't get a rich man, I'll just not have anybody".  Pretty sad when they have to lower a woman such as that into the grave with only nieces and nephews, if she has them, who may remember her as the "fun aunt", or shirt-tail cousins or those "friends" around whom so many women's lives revolve.  (Do not read that as a suggestion of lesbianism.)

He seemed quite annoyed at the lack of ambition among young Trad men. He used to mock their interests and goals,

Mocking their interest and goals would seem counterproductive to encouraging them to have healthy ambition.

which he quoted as Hunt'n and Fishin'.

Reminds me of what Newman said:

What is the province of the laity? To hunt, to shoot, to entertain. These matters they understand, but to meddle with ecclesiastical matters they have no right at all