\&gt;Yours is some nebulous unquantifiable definition that boils down "you're middle class if you feel like you're middle class"

No, you're describing your definition. I said almost the exact opposite of that.

\&gt;  I'm true middle class while making $150k household because we're still  recovering from the debt we incurred going back to school during the  recession. Once I'm debt free we'll be "upper class".

You have a pile of debt you need to work for wages in order to pay back, and if you don't work, you don't eat. You're working class, mate. When you pay off your debt and build up some assets and/or if you advance in your career far enough, maybe you'll reach the middle class eventually. But unless you start a company and it takes off, you're never going to even sniff the upper class.

I get that it feels good to pretend that being comfortable and being upper class are the same thing, because that's preferable to acknowledging the inherent unfairness of the world we live in. But you're not a child so you should really stop living in the fairy tale where someone who works hard to educate themselves and have a good career reaches the higher tiers of society, and instead come down to the world you actually live in where the billionaires are raping and pillaging the vast majority of the population and won't stop until the feudal aristocracy is back. 

You might have done quite well from your starting position, and good for you for doing so. The game was rigged against you and you did quite well despite that, so you can now sit back and continue to live in fairy tale land if you want, and your life won't be any different for it. But the game will still be rigged for the next generation, and by living in that fairy tale land and advocating to others, you're actively helping them to keep the game rigged. I'm not asking you to try to overthrow the social order, I'm just asking you to stop supporting the fiction that social mobility is only a matter of hard work.

\&gt; Some guy busting his ass and making $200k on an oil rig is definitely upper-middle if not plain upper class.

I mean I don't even understand how I'm supposed to have a conversation about this with you if you're going to say things like that and not even notice that you've defeated your own argument. By definition, anyone who has to bust their ass doing manual labor is working class.