Should You Play The Status Game?

What a biology principle teaches us about our desire for status

Hello reader,

Humans crave higher status in society all the time.

We do whatever we can to grab stuff that can make us feel like we’ve arrived. We buy stupid-looking bags just because the logo on them will raise our standing. We put up our joint family’s kidneys as collateral to buy an elephantine SUV we don’t need.

The nature and quality of these purchases keep going up. But funnily, the purchases will never end as we’re locked in a status war with everyone else.

Selling our souls for an Insta pic like this

Can biology teach us an important lesson about these status wars? Of course, it can, or else it’d not be the title of the article.

To explain this, let me turn to an important principle called the Red Queen Effect.

Red Queen Effect

The simplest way to describe this effect is that it’s a never-ending arms race between a predator and their victim- where both sides keep adapting and adjusting constantly just to maintain the same position.

The forever war between humans and viruses is a great example.

We humans have been battling viruses for thousands of years. One day we developed a vaccine against a particular virus that helped us defeat them and the diseases they caused.

But over time, that virus learns to adapt to the vaccine through a genetic mutation- so now the good-ole vaccine no longer works, and the updated version of the virus (let’s just call it Virus 2.0) can once again infect humans and keep them sick (and busy scrolling Insta on their beds) for weeks.

Once again the genius scientists in the lab get to work, motivated by all the stardom and fan-following and Victoria’s Secret models they’d get once they succeed.

They develop Vaccine 2.0 which can defeat this new mutation and humans are all back to their boring jobs and live (un)happily ever after.

But once again the virus adapts to this change over time. And without having to repeat this cycle a bazillion times, I’ll just say that both sides keep adapting over and over again as the cycle goes on till the end of time.

“Okay, that’s quite cool, but what the hell does it have to do with my unhealthy desire for status?” you may be thinking.

Well, the actions of the average Joe and the elites in this status game are similar to this Red Queen Effect.

The Masses & The Elite

Just like the virus example, the race to increase one’s status is never-ending.

Status is a zero-sum game, because none of us can accept a society where everybody has equal standing, and we do all we can to show how we’re a notch above the person standing next to us in the public toilet.

It’s never a game that multiple parties can win and it’s a game the elites can’t afford to lose. So they’ll do all they can to ensure that by the moment you catch up to the high-end trends and fads, they’ve moved on to something else.

If you treat this as a game between the luxury class (I’ll just call them the “elites” for simplicity) and the masses (which very much includes fortunate people like you and me who aren’t part of the elite), it aligns quite well with the Red Queen pattern.

Here are some examples:

• Having lavish & luxurious dinners earlier was meant to be a display of one’s wealth. But now that a large section of people can do this, the luxury class has moved on. Now they’re all about home-cooked organic salads, 23-hour fasting, Ozempic (a drug that reduces weight), and “biohacking”. Showing that you don’t need to eat is the new luxury statement, while the masses are just catching up to the “wastefully expensive luxury dinner” phenomenon.
  

• By the time you catch up with international vacations, the elites would have moved on to space tourism.
  

• By the time you catch up to the idea of owning luxury cars, the elites have already moved on to yachts.
  

• And so by the time you start buying Gucci or wearing a Rolex, one can guess that the elites would’ve moved on to some new inaccessible stuff that everyone can’t afford.

Seen this way, it’s quite clear that the masses chase status and covet the goods owned by the elites. But the moment they start getting there, the elites have abandoned those now “massy” goods and acquired ever-more exclusive tastes.

This is nothing but the Red Queen effect- a cycle of continuous adaptation by both parties as they do (or rather buy) more and more just to stay in the same relative position.

This is an endless dynamic, and paradoxically, no one’s better off engaging in this race.

If the elites felt great about themselves, they’d perhaps not try so hard to stay a hundred steps ahead. And if the masses felt great about themselves, they’d perhaps see through the charade and not even participate in this futile exercise.

So a critical question to ask yourself before falling for these endless purchases is “Would I still buy this if I couldn't show it to anyone?”.

That’s a nice litmus test to detect whether it was done for the sake of the experience itself, or for the express purpose of participating in the status game.

And if you find that you just can’t come out of the urge to play this game, the priority should be to strike the source of this desire at its foundations and begin a process of changing your mind.

That’s how the status game works.

Do you still want to keep playing?

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Thanks for tuning in. I’d love to invite your thoughts on the status game.

Have you noticed yourself playing it? Have you struggled with the desire to be a part of it even if you know it’s pointless? Or have you taken steps to opt out?

Share your thoughts by responding to the email- let’s start a conversation.

If you enjoyed today’s article, please read:

• Dopamine Culture, New Desi Millionaires, And More

• Hedonic Escalators

• Optimal Deprivation [Important]