The Status Game

Humans are a species of great ape. We survive by belonging to highly co-operative groups that share labour. We’ve been living in settled communities for around five hundred generations. But we existed in mobile hunter-gatherer bands for far longer than this – at least one hundred thousand generations. Our brains remain programmed for this style of

Disconnection is a fearsome state for a social animal to find itself in. It’s a warning that its life is failing and its world has become hostile: where there’s no connection, there’s no protection.

in the kinds of premodern communities our brains evolved in, ‘social status is a universal cue to the control of resources’, writes psychologist Professor David Buss. ‘Along with status comes better food, more abundant territory, superior health care.’ It leads to greater access to preferred mates and ‘bestows on children social opportunities’ that

hungers. If you want to rule the world, save the world, buy the world or fuck the world, the first thing to pursue is status. It’s the golden key that unlocks our dreams.

an increase in logo size of one point on a seven-point scale translates to a $122.26 price decrease for Gucci handbags and a $26.27 price decrease for Louis Vuitton handbags’. The logo on Bottega Veneta’s $2,500 Hobo bag isn’t visible. They put it on the inside.

LIFE IS NOT as it appears. As neuroscientist Professor Chris Frith writes, ‘our perception of the world is a fantasy that collides with reality’. The dream state we exist in is founded on objective truth – we’re alive on a planet, breathing air under skies. But on these foundations we build an infinite variety of imaginary games.

To admit to being motivated by improving our rank risks making others think less of us, which loses us rank.

An African proverb says, ‘the child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth’.

But how do we gauge this rank? How do we tell how we’re doing in this game of life? We do it, in part, by assigning values to objects. A Cartier watch is worth this much status; a Casio watch is worth that. These ‘status symbols’ tell us, and our co-players, how we’re performing. We pay obsessive attention to them.