Status is a means for connection, not an end in itself

People typically are more status seeking than they admit to others or even themselves

The impact of status and the desire for it in society is easily underestimated, because status is a taboo. It is not well regarded to be status seeking, in fact, seeking status is often seen as low status – an idealised high status person already has everything they need, including status. In addition, it feels unpleasantly adjacent to thinking of people as inferior or superior. Status has a zero sum quality that makes it feel meaningless.

Hence many status games have evolved plausible deniability, allowing the status drive to be pursued while being hidden from others and even ourselves. People pursue hobbies that can bring genuine joy, connection and growth and also just happen to be expensive (e.g. fancy camera equipment), demand a significant amount of time (e.g. travel), intellectual energy (e.g. appreciating challenging art and understanding its context), skill (e.g. performing arts like dance or music) or physical fitness or impress others in some other way. We may fool ourselves into thinking we’re not seeking status when we are, e.g. believing we just want certain clothes for their quality etc. – because it is simpler to fool others when we also fool ourselves. Our hearts draw no clear line between practicality, pleasure, connection and status. 

A lot of what exists in the world is due in large part to status drive, for example companies, beautiful buildings or art. Successful societies are organised in a way so that status more often is gained through net positive activities, e.g. solving problems and charging for that or creating art that enriches life, rather than negative ones like murdering rivals. Because much work is done for the sake of status, working hours do not decrease as much as productivity increases when technology improves. Unfortunately it also means wellbeing does not increase as much as one expects when societal wealth increases. 

Status does indeed matter

In fact, the status drive makes sense, because status does matter. Most obviously, there is an intense high we feel after an increase in status – I remember that feeling after getting into Cambridge, or when making more money as an intern at quant trading shop Jane Street than many full time finance employees, or when introducing a beautiful girlfriend. And there is a corresponding crushing feeling when losing status, say when I did not receive a return offer from Jane Street. These intense feelings do not last, because hedonic adaptation brings us back towards our baseline after a while  – but not all the way, because status has significant lasting impact on health and wellbeing:

• British civil servants of higher rank have lower mortality than low ranked ones (e.g. a risk ratio of 3.6 between the highest and lowest ranked ones for deaths from heart disease), despite receiving the same healthcare through the NHS. Much of the difference remains even after controlling for factors such as smoking and BMI, and even income does not appear to be the most important factor. In his book Status Syndrome, Michael Marmot, one of the authors of this Whitehall Study, lists many more examples of such health disparities among status gradients, for example with Oscar winners living 4 years longer than their co-stars or Oscar nominees.  “Gradients in health abound. They run all the way down the social scale from the most to the least privileged, covering everyone in between. We see them in just about every society that has looked. Quite remarkably, we see them for diseases of poverty and for so-called diseases of affluence.”
• Baboons of low or unstable rank have increased cortisol compared to baboons with a stable high rank
• High status individuals have more serotonin activity
• And lower inflammation
• It is possible to change stress and other health biomarkers in monkeys by artificially changing their status

Status is about connection

But why is status so important? It is because we are social animals. As humans we strongly rely on connection. Our ancestors were doomed to almost certain death if expelled by their tribe, so social rejection feels viscerally threatening to us. Access to food, shelter and physical safety is less dependent on status in our current age, especially if living in a modern welfare state. But we still carry the wiring from our ancestors with us. And connection is still key for thriving in a modern society – most of the achievements of our civilization, such as material abundance, are due to the cooperation of a very large number of individuals unseen in any other animal. If we want to have the full experience of life including raising children, we still need to attract a partner. Altogether, this amounts to our relationships having a massive impact on our well-being, with major studies such as the Harvard Study suggesting that they are in fact the most important factor for our health and happiness. The impact of loneliness and social isolation has been estimated to be equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Loneliness is correlated with other negative emotions such as sadness and worry.

Aside from our parents (if we are lucky) and some government and charity support, love and support is generally not unconditional. Status is far from the only factor affecting the quality of our connections, but it is important, in particular for forming new connections. 

I think of status as easily identifiable signals that indicate one of the following:

• The ability to help (or more rarely harm) others in some way, including changing their own status. For example a wealthy person can provide direct financial support or provide credible career advice and connections, or a physician friend can provide quick advice without having to go through the medical system. If in need of a less taboo word, one might call this credibility. Sometimes, such as in a job hierarchy, a higher status person formally is entitled to order the lower status person around – but the reason the lower status person obeys is mostly still that the higher status person can improve or worsen their life
• A general impressiveness, for example a beautiful highly symmetric face (most relevant in a dating context through indicating strong genes, but also a proxy for status of the first type due to both being correlated)

Most forms of status fit both of the definitions above. 

Status signals make other people interested in spending their scarce time to explore forming a relationship with us. A homeless beggar can still make friends, but mostly with other homeless people, who have limitations in terms of the type of support they can give. Higher status allows us to form connections more easily with other people who also have higher status and ability to help, while sacrificing less of our freedom and authenticity. Tim Ferris can have Peter Attia as his physician, someone of average or moderately high status cannot. Status outlasts any individual relationship (unless that relationship is the cause of the status), providing a sense of stability and resilience in the face of loss of both romantic and platonic relationships – hence the common urge to “upgrade” ourselves and our lives (actually our status) after a breakup. 

Autonomy and social support are both crucial for our health and wellbeing. Status allows us to gain more support while giving up less autonomy. 

The status drive can be anxiety provoking 

The status drive can be anxiety inducing. To a large part that is due to achievements being benchmarked to age – think about the “Forbes 30 under 30” award, or people being celebrated for being the youngest ever person to achieve something. This can make life feel like a race, with a feeling best described by the red queen in Alice in Wonderland “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” An excessive focus on status can remove playfulness and ease from life, and make it feel meaningless. Ultimately a hunger for status can be insatiable: As we rise in status, we become exposed to higher status people, and our goals can easily shift. 

Ironically, a highly urgent status drive can reduce status:

• An anxious, contracted urgent energy can appear low status
• Long term status (and happiness more generally) profits from spending our time on activities that deeply align with our personality. Sometimes that requires a change of direction in our life, e.g. career. But such a shift often leads to a status drop in the short- to mid-term, because we are less experienced in the new activity and have less of a reputation to lean on
• If we resent high status people, we may pointlessly try to drag them down in our mind or even reality. It would be more conducive for our own status to instead either learn form them, or mostly ignore them because their method of achieving status is not suitable for us
• More generally, making certain achievements part of our identity can make it harder to have a growth mindset – recognizing opportunities for improvement may threaten our identity

Excessive status-drive can hurt connection directly, defeating the original goal:

• If we focus too much on status when choosing friends, we may neglect other qualities important for a good relationship, such as kindness and integrity. Even worse, if we view status as a linear scale, we can view anyone who wants a relationship with us as being lower status than us and hence not worthwhile – we end up wanting what we cannot have – a very isolating attitude. 
• Through workaholism we may view relationships as a nuisance and not give them enough attention. I sometimes felt like this when working at McKinsey, and never want to work this much again – I want to be available to my close friends at relatively short notice.
• Instead of being present with others in a relaxed way, we may be anxiously focused on achieving some outcome, or validation of our status.
• Excessive impression management can prevent vulnerability and hence a deep, authentic connection
• We may try to gain others respect by having them recognize us as superior, for example by bragging, or demonstrating and asserting our knowledge and expertise. But they may end ups liking us less because they feel put down or not recognized, and because we’re not engaging in a real dialogue.
• We may consciously drop loyal, supportive friends whose company we enjoy when we gain status, believing that outgrowing friends is part of or evidence of growth. Less harshly, we may excessively deprioritize existing relationships when busy with new opportunities from increased status. We may come to regret doing this, because a deeply trusting and committed relationship takes time to build, it takes time for challenges to occur that test the relationship. The new higher status friends have not yet proven themselves in the same way. 
• Conversely, the fear of others abandoning us may make it difficult for us to be happy for and supportive of our friends’ successes. My experience is that this fear is not completely unfounded, which certainly increased my status anxiety – but if we allow ourselves to be an angry, envious, competitive person, we may drive away also those people that would have maintained the relationship even if they gain a lot of status. Status can have a win-lose quality – but overall social life is not like that. 

How can we deal with our drive for status?

I believe the best way is to find a balance between different approaches to address our desire for connection:

1. A decent ability to meet our needs independently from the support of others
2. Relationship skills, since successful relationships are very much not only about status
3. Several sources of status that align well with our values and abilities

One approach is to reduce the need for status by reducing the need for connection and being okay or even feeling great being alone. After all, the practical need for connection is less critical in modern life than it used to be in primal times. Maybe we can adapt our psyche to better match those changes. For example by

• Acquiring financial resources so that we are less dependent on others
• Trying to meet our own emotional needs for being seen, validated and supported, e.g. through journaling
• Raising a pet
• Hiring a therapist, who will generally not refuse to work with us because of low status or poor relationship skills, as long as we pay them and treat them with basic respect
• Experientially realising that nothing bad happens when are alone, for example as described here by Aella: “You’re drunk with the agony of loneliness and it’s in you now, underneath the skin of your palms. There’s nothing left to bring yourself into contact with, nothing else to look for, because that pain is now a part of the You that Looks. You are in the world where you have been abandoned. You have grieved it, are grieving it, will always grieve it. It was hard when the cold was settling into you, but now that it’s here, you’re… somehow okay? It still hurts, but the hurt is quiet. You aren’t moving into it or against it, and in that stillness, where the current has finally settled, you find peace. You’ve plunged in and somehow still have consciousness behind your eyes and you’re somehow okay. And there you find the lesson—in a world where you are alone, you will still be okay.”

Less appealing to me is to dismiss the value of others through misanthropy, like Schopenhauer does: “We will gradually become indifferent to what goes on in the minds of other people when we acquire an adequate knowledge of the superficial and futile nature of their thoughts, of the narrowness of their views, of the paltriness of their sentiments, of the perversity of their opinions, and of the number of their errors.  We shall then see that whoever attaches a lot of value to the opinions of others pays them too much honour.”

In general, people who take the independence approach too far, not working on building relationships at all and becoming a hermit instead, never seem genuinely happy to me. And we never should shame ourselves for our desire for connection, it is after all natural. But a decent amount of independence is helpful, and can also make it easier to build relationships, because we don’t need to ask too much of people too quickly (at its most extreme, such neediness can take the form of borderline syndrome, which can be very difficult for the sufferer as well as the people around them). And in the process of building independence we usually learn skills that can bring value to others. In a sense most of us follow the independence path to a certain degree when we grow up and reduce our dependence on our parents. 

Status is just one of several factors that secures relationships, and most important in the beginning. Purely focusing on status means becoming a narcissist and sociopath – meaning that most emotionally intelligent people will try to avoid us. Many other things are also important aside from status:

• Being present and attentive when interacting
• Active listening through paraphrasing etc. 
• Putting ourselves into other people’s shoes to better understand them and how we can support them
• Validating their feelings
• Gradually increasing mutual investment and vulnerability
• Behaving with integrity, including
  • Honesty
  • Coming through on commitments
• Being available and ready to offer
  • Practical support
  • Emotional support (consistently available emotional comfort is in fact a large part of what makes drugs and certain behaviours addictive – they are a substitute for the ready availability of comfort from real consistent relationships)

Just being available and kind is not enough however, we need to actually have a decent amount of value to offer. We need to be both visibly able to provide value, and willing to do so. And we need to be careful sometimes to not offer too much to people who have demonstrated that they are not willing to reciprocate  – unless they are people we want to help unconditionally out of a sense of purpose, like children or the disadvantaged. If we overinvest thanklessly, we may sabotage our ability to obtain status, and we may become cynical and resentful – a state that will ultimately sabotage connection. And people may lose respect for us, because they sense that we do not respect ourselves.

As adults we can choose our status games

As children we are stuck in a social environment (family and school mostly), so we may have to bend more to fit in, being inauthentic or playing status games we don’t find otherwise valuable. The same was probably true for most adults living in small tribes in ancient times. But as adults in the modern world such situations are rather rare – for example prison, and to a lesser degree being stuck in a job due to financial commitments with no Fuck You Money to cover them. 

We need to get along reasonably with most people, but we only need to build deep connections with a small number of people in the world. We do not need to make people we don’t like love us. There are large numbers of status games we can play, that can help us find connection with different kinds of people.

Global status games can make a wide variety of people impressed with us and more likely to connect with us, e.g.:

• Wealth
• A degree from a prestigious university
• Beyond wealth, a prestigious career. These can be careers that receive a lot of media coverage and stereotyping, like being an astronaut. Or ones that can provide direct aid to friends, such as being a physician or lawyer. 
• A followership on social media
• Fitness and physical beauty
• A calm, confident, happy energy
• A congruent sense of style
• Social intuition
• A large amount of interesting experiences and stories
• Wise (at least in appearance) thoughts on life built from such experiences and reflection
• A strong sense of humour with a large repertoire of jokes and / or on the spot wittiness
• Conspicuous leisure, e.g. demonstrated through travel posts
• A high status partner
• An apparently happy, well functioning family
• A recognized contribution to the world

Local status games can provide a lot of opportunity for connection with people that share those interests or are in the relevant community, e.g.:

• Success in a hobby, e.g. being a capable dancer or pool player. Hobbies can also provide global status if
  • They are widely appreciated and can be displayed somewhat frequently, e.g. singing
  • A professional or celebrity level is reached
• Being friends with high status people
• Knowing how to get into exclusive parties, e.g. in Berlin with its confusing and ever changing dress codes (A bohemian status game that provides an alternative to mainstream status games – “Now the nerds and weirdos can keep the normies out”)
• Taking “badass” physical risks, e.g. fights, dangerous sports and stunts, drug use, opening beer bottles using teeth (especially among males, teenagers and in high crime circles)

Because of the multitude of status games, it is not possible to place people on a linear status hierarchy. That is a good thing, because as mentioned earlier, thinking of status as a singular quantity can lead to all kinds of problems – for example believing that anyone who likes us must be lower status than ourselves. By looking at status as something diversified, we can respect what others bring to the table without viewing ourselves as inferior. 

It is definitely impossible to succeed at every status game. Luckily we don’t need to, people generally don’t look down on us for not having some accomplishment that they have, instead they’re attracted by what we are good at. It is risky to focus on one status game to the detriment of everything else, in case we cannot continue with it, or want to impress someone who does not care about it. At the same, spreading ourselves too thin limits our potential for high status or a large positive impact in the world, as this usually requires some sort of specialisation. So how do we choose? At least some of our status games should ideally be global, so that we can engage with a large variety of people. Local status games are also valuable though, fantastic deep individual connections can come from them. What we definitely want to be careful about are fake engineered activities that don’t actually bring much status, e.g.

• The fictional status accruing to our character in a video game
• Many forms of consumption that are marketed as high status (though some forms of conspicuous consumption can genuinely bring status)

Beyond that, a status game we choose should as much as possible be something

• We enjoy
• We are talented at / comes easy to us
• We can feel authentic in 

Unless an activity brings a lot of status quickly, it also should have another benefit or several, like

• Health, including mental health
• Financial security and freedom
• Connection
• Meaning and contribution, especially given that status can feel meaningless and zero-sum

This incidentally also enables the plausible deniability discussed earlier. Across our activities, we want each of the above four life ingredients covered in at least one way in our life. I abandoned physics for example, because while it offers status and can be enjoyable (as well as frustrating at times),

• It does not provide much deep connection
• It is not a very effective path towards wealth relative to how difficult it is
• I consider the practical impact of the kind fundamental theoretical physics I did pretty negligible

 It is also worth keeping in mind that some of our status activities can actually damage the other ingredients of a good life  – for example high-level competitive sports damaging health. It is also not certain that every kind of status is helpful – mainstream fame comes with significant downsides, status among a smaller group of people we find highly valuable could be preferable.

In many cases people may acquire status without thinking about it if they pursue the above four goals for their own sake. This does not always happen though, e.g.  

• A focus on meaning can lead to being an unsung hero. The lack of status may also make it difficult to create the maximum positive impact
• A focus on enjoyment can lead to a low status nerd life. This can be quite lonely, especially if the nerd cannot find community with others who share that interest (i.e. a local status game). Nerds with high global status usually enjoy an activity that brings plenty of value to others, e.g. IT

If we are reasonably confident however that what brings us joy and meaning also gets us a decent amount of status, we can just pursue the joy and meaning etc. without thinking about status all the time – this can feel more wholesome. 

Status tends to become less important as we age

Status is more important for forming new relationships than maintaining old ones. As people get older, they tend to accumulate loyal, loving long-term friendships as well as a long term romantic partnership. These relationships are supported by a strong foundation of gratitude, trust and deep understanding that new relationships could not replace, even if those new relationships are with people of significantly higher status. As a friend put it to me: “I would not leave my husband even if I found someone who was better in every single way”.  Hence the importance of status decreases continuously from a peak in adolescence, and can become pretty small in old age https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32881548/. Together with the status taboo, this causes a lot of people to give advice not to care about status – this advice is helpful in the sense that as we advance through life, it makes sense to reduce how much we care about status. But this does not mean it would be good advice for a teenager to try to not care about status at all.

Being conscious of status in a relaxed way

Ultimately, status does impact well-being, and we do not need to pretend that it does not. But we also do not need to be obsessed with it – it probably evolved in large part to optimise our procreation rather than our happiness. And it is only one of several ingredients for strong relationships of all kinds. There will always be people of lower and higher status than us. We can have meaningful connections no matter what our status, status just affects the range of people we can build relationships with.