Why Status Is Confusing

People’s ideas about ‘status’ are pretty confused. We know it has something to do with power, but get mixed up in the specifics. Are rich people high status? Well yeah, but say this at a party and someone will point out that they don’t find rich people high status; a rich guy showed up at their birthday party last year and he was kind of annoying, and nobody invited him back. Someone else will volunteer that Trump is very rich, but if he entered the room right now they’d dump their beer in his face.

Okay - so is it being liked, then? Do you have to be charming and charismatic to be high status? Maybe, but you remember you have a sister who’s got an amazing gravity field, everyone falls in love with her, people don’t just invite her to their party, they actively hunt her down and try to bribe her to attend - but she’s scattered, poor, and doesn’t follow through on any projects. I mean, hell, people really like their pets, but this isn’t Egypt and your cute calico kitty isn’t getting any statues made of her any time soon.

Okay, so you suggest fame as an option. But everyone shouts this down immediately - Hitler and Ted Bundy are famous, are you calling them high status? A drunk guy from the kitchen shouts that if the illuminati existed, they’d be high status, even though nobody knows who they are - clearly being high status means being able to impact important events, to pull the strings of government!

Someone shouts back: “Cody you’re an idiot; Steve Irwin was cool as fuck and he wasn’t pulling no strings of government”

“What, if status is just ‘being cool’ then I’m the highest status one here”, Cody says.

So is it a combination of a lot of things? You have to be charismatic, and rich, and famous, and powerful, all together? Suggesting this starts a clamor; why not just have individual words for each metric? Why do we have one generalized word? Or is this a DnD character loadout, where you get different areas to pour your status points into but it all adds up to an overall ‘status’ vibe somehow? Cody stumbles into the living room clutching a Blue Moon and says cult leaders are obviously high status, they have charisma, wealth, fame, and absolute power in their communities - but this only serves to spark a heated debate over whether people would feel intimidated if Keith Ranerie or Osho walked into the room right now. (wait - is ‘feeling intimidated’ how you know someone is high status?)

Stephanie argues that status is local, obviously! You can be high status in some communities but not others. That rich guy she kicked out from the party last year was probably real high status in relation to some group, somewhere, but not to her.

This seems true-ish, but something feels weird about it. If a billionaire walked into the party right now, there would be status radiating off of them like a glow. He’d glow even if nobody in this party particularly liked billionaires, or valued their money much, even if the specific billionaire was real annoying.

Like, what would happen if the king of England walked into a meetup for punk anarchists? Maybe some of the punks would try to look cool by insulting the King, but that meant the King had enough status in their eyes that they could win coolness points by dunking on him. But probably they wouldn’t even try to insult him, they’d probably be flustered and deferential and awkward.

So, status clearly isn’t totally local. Maybe it’s a little local?

It seems like everyone is confused. Nobody really knows what status is, not deeply - it seems made up of a bunch of things, but different things matter at different times, and in different communities, and is local to community but also kind of not local? Why is this so hard to think about?

Part of the difficulty of hammering this down is that everyone is really uncomfortable with status, and we go to great lengths to pretend it doesn’t exist - at least locally. Despite our obsession with establishing rank (more on this later), we go to great lengths to obscure our exact status to others. In my ‘how hot are you’ survey, women mostly rated themselves between 6-7/10 regardless of how hot they actually were - high enough to be above average, but low enough to have plausible deniability. When mentioning salaries, people will say they “make six figures” instead of saying the actual number. If you ask a group of friends “who here is the highest status,” you’ll witness a sudden internal tension as people awkwardly assess their ranking while simultaneously trying to pretend they aren’t actually thinking directly about it at all. They will almost certainly begin compulsively uttering jokes to break the tension.

This is all downstream of the fact that, built into our bones, is a deep discomfort at being lower status than our peers. As I write this, I just checked Substack and found that I’ve slipped from #1 in the Education category, to #2. I expected this to happen - I haven’t been focusing on conversion-to-paid posts in a long time, and my paid subscriber count is dipping as a consequence. But even despite this, when I saw the fall, it felt like I’d been slapped in the face; my chest and arms flushed, my breathing quickened, and for a few minutes my attention was compulsively focused on my fall from queen to jack as much as it would be on the pain of a deep papercut.

Part of our aversion to status is fear of this sensation - discovering that you actually rank below those around you.

Imagine with a group of long-term coworkers doing the same job, everyone’s salaries gets leaked, and you discover that you earn less than everyone else. Or, imagine that you go out clubbing with two friends, and your friends get flirted with nonstop while you’re completely ignored. These things hurt much worse than if you had no coworkers, or if you’d gone out with no friends. It’s not the experience itself that is the source of the pain, but rather discovering your true place in your peer group is lower than what you’d hoped.

And if you are fortunate enough to be beautiful, you might find yourself carefully acting as though your less-beautiful friend is exactly as hot as you are. At no point might you directly acknowledge the fact that they are uglier - that would be cruel, and they would feel bad about it, despite the fact that they likely are already fully aware of the attractiveness gap.

a dove ad campaign

So we end up in a world where we’re all secretly believing we are a 6.5/10, despite the fact that the average must be 5. For the sake of dignity, each of us imbues ourselves with a little specialness. We warp our reality around our own specialness, and thus our vision becomes warped as well.

We also really don’t like making implicit social things, explicit. Part of this is romantic - no matter how dissectible the human brain, we still like believing in a soul. No matter our understanding of evolutionary incentives, a mother’s love for her child still seems like magic.

But I think most of the aversion comes from deception. It’s despicable when pick-up artists study explicitly the art of manipulating the pants off women. We’d really prefer men who are organically good at manipulating the pants off women!

A guy who is studying and executing rules of attractiveness must not be inherently attractive, somehow, and it wouldn’t be fair for him to get laid with a woman who wants inherent attractiveness. Being able to consciously perform stuff like passing shit-tests, escalating kino, means they gain the power to display confidence without actually having it. This is a superpower in a world where we largely view confidence as difficult to fake. It’s like learning to lie in a world that has never heard of lying.

Status is likewise something that we subconsciously view as an important, innate reflection of someone, that informs how we relate to them, and where it would be really terrible if we were misguided somehow. We treat status as it has immense consequence.

(this does have big implications for the role of status in our psyche, which I’ll get into in an upcoming post)

To think too explicitly about status risks giving people the ability to deceive others about their status. Much as PUA reduces flirtatious interactions as a means to an end, being too status-aware threatens to reduce social interactions as a means to ladder climb. This seems bad! Really, we want our relationships to feel real and organic! We need to believe in the realness of it to ourselves.

We need to believe in this because it is low status to gain status through explicit awareness of status. If you discovered a man who’d seduced you had done it through pickup artistry, you might suddenly find him less attractive; similarly, if you found that someone high-status in your community had carefully studied how status works, you might suddenly see her as lower status. Before, you thought she’d got there by being Truly Cool - but now you see she had other methods besides True Coolness of attaining that rank. What a drop! And one of the things we’re best at, as primates, is carefully tracking what lowers status in our culture and avoiding it like the plague. If knowing how status works, lowers your status, we simply prevent our thoughts from thinking about it with too much skill. We do not want to conceive of ourself as low status. We are 6.5/10. We make six figures. We are all above average. Everything is okay.

Our terror of being low status has systemically damaged our ability to think directly about status. Status is usually something that happens to others. Sure, celebrities are high status, but you didn’t contribute to them being high status, you know they’re just people. Sure, the fast food cashier is supposedly ‘low status’, but you don’t treat them as low status, you smile at them warmly and see their humanity. Surely you, personally, are immune!

And lastly, status is hard to think about because it’s complicated.

In my study of sexuality and fetishes, I’ve found the more I learn, the more confused I become. For example, maybe fetishes are really about some underlying emotion or theme. I interviewed one man whose fetish was getting a handjob, on a couch, by an aunt or mother figure. She had to be disinterested and casual. Seems juicy - but all my attempts to target a central emotion were in vain. Was he aroused by being ignored? Maybe, but there was no other scenario involving being ignored that he was aroused by. Was it something to do with the taboo of incest violation? No, there were no other scenarios involving incest that were hot. No matter what angle I took, I couldn’t find any theory that held out. While he said the disinterest and the taboo were hot, he didn’t find disinterest or tabooness hot in any other situation. So what was going on?

Maybe it comes out of some formative experience in youth? But how would that explain one man I interviewed whose fetish was a specific scene in a Superman movie? He’d only ever masturbated to that scene his entire life. No elements of anything in the scene - superpowers, emotions, the characters - were erotic in any other context, ever. He first saw the scene as a teenager, post puberty, but that scene was what triggered masturbation.

…What? What’s going on?

The reality is likely that there is no tidy theory that can possibly explain human sexuality. Some systems are just massively complicated, and while we can describe them, the amount of details we’d have to include in a full description would be immense and unpleasant to read and perhaps look like a full accounting of all the neurons in someone’s brain. Different fetishes trigger at different times, some are likely more socially induced than others, some are likely hormonally mediated, others genetic, and all of these factors manifest differently depending on your sex and gender.

Human societal interaction is also massively complicated, and trying to identify the rules of status can be as hard as identifying why fetishes occur. We’re built out of so many things - love for families, enjoyment of art, satisfaction from hard work; religion isn’t just a system but often a genuine experience of belief in God. All of these things intertwine fluidly with our status incentives, and extracting the pure status out for study can be as challenging as extracting the yellow back out of orange paint.

So for this series of posts, I’m going to be looking at status as a lens - much as the true nature of a computer is simply incomprehensible bits and bytes in its hardware, but we can nevertheless ‘understand’ it if we use the carefully constructed lens of a computer screen. I am not claiming status is the one truth to rule them all, and much of what I will discuss can be described equally as well by other frameworks. I’m not claiming there’s no poetry in human interaction, or that our interactions are just status. Rather, I’m going to try to present a series of rules as a toolbox for helping predict human behavior. For a time, let’s put on our Status Glasses and investigate what we see.