The Status Game

The subconscious circuits that generate this hallucinatory story-world were ‘carved by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species’ evolutionary history’.

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

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.

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.

WE DON’T FEEL like players of games. We feel like heroes in stories. This is the illusion the brain spins for us. It makes us feel as if we are the hero at the centre of the universe, orbited by a cast of supporting characters.

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

Status isn’t about being liked or accepted: these are separate needs, associated with connection. When people defer to us, offer respect, admiration or praise, or allow us to influence them in some way, that’s status. It feels good. Feeling good about it is part of our human nature. It’s in our basic coding, our evolution, our DNA. And it doesn’t r

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.

the greater and faster the downward mobility, the more likely it is to trigger suicide’.