From Fixed Local To Liquid Global Status Games

Discussion

Erik Torenberg on Status Games:

"Status gets us into a tribe.

In this piece I’d like to establish a deeper understanding of status games in order to understand why being vulnerable has become high status, why high status people feel compelled to hide their status, and why status anxiety plays a more prominent role in society today than it did in the past.

We’ll address that last one first. Why is status anxiety more prominent today?

Starting at the beginning: For much of the last 10,000 years of human history, the vast majority of people lived in settled agrarian communities where status mobility was limited: there was a strict hierarchy based on age and gender and everyone had the same occupation and religion. There was no need to ask: "who am I?” — limited social choices determined who you were both on the inside and the outside.

In other words, for most of human history, our status was fixed. You had a job and a family and a position in society. Our internal wiring hasn’t changed much, but our environment has. Today, status is malleable: what you do, where you live, and what you believe are in a larger sense up to you. Your position in society is much more up to you than at any point in history. Depending on how your life and decisions play out, you will end up either relatively higher status or lower status. You have agency over this outcome. This means that if you make it, it was partly due to your efforts. But this also means that if you didn’t make it, that’s on you. Which means status dynamics are high stakes!

But who measures status? The tribe. How do they do it? Well, gossip. Remember: back in the day there was no police force, no judiciary, and no prison system. Gossip was how we regulated our societies for thousands of years. After all, people needed to know who to collaborate with and who to avoid. But once we settled down and our communities started growing big enough that we couldn't know every member personally, gossip stopped working as a method of adjudicating and regulating the behavior of the tribe. So we invented a new accountability mechanism: an all-seeing, all-knowing God that could either reward and punish us. And once we stopped believing in god, the media took over god’s role. More recently, social media has become the newest accountability enforcer — and it’s a disaster.

Indeed: Social media has deeply changed how status works.

Our brains evolved to work in small groups of 150 people and now we’ve plugged them into the entire world via the internet overnight.

This amplifies the comparison game we play. Previously, our envy was limited to 150 people. But now we’re constantly comparing ourselves to 8 billion people. Take any skill we might have — we can now easily find someone orders of magnitude better at it.

Social media has put people in a 24/7 global status competition hamster wheel and most people can't keep up. There are more ways to gain status, recognition and community than ever before — but there are also more ways than ever to remind ourselves how many people are better, richer, and happier than we are.

In addition to the comparison game, we’re also forced to play the tribal warfare game. When we see another person or group of people acting in a way that is against what our tribe stands for, we feel a need to attack them in order to prove loyalty to our tribe. We feel viscerally outraged. Back in the day, this would have happened very rarely. Now, it happens every day.

I heard someone on a podcast say that seeing someone who holds different political beliefs is neurologically similar to walking through the forest and encountering a bear. This explains why people on Twitter get outraged so easily.

Here’s another analogy: Twitter is to status and outrage what a candy bar is to our craving for sugar. To be sure, our propensity to chase status and get outraged has always existed the same way our craving for sugar has—but these new factors have exacerbated our craving to previously unheard of levels.

Similarly, another problematic human pattern that social media amplifies is our tendency to cancel and scapegoat people."

(https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/status-vulnerability-and-status-vulnerability)