Daniel's notes on The Status Game

Once inside any group, we're rarely content to flop about on its lower rungs. We're driven to rise within it. When we succeed, and receive approval and acclaim from our community, we experience happiness. We feel as if our lives have meaning and purpose and that we're thriving. These emotions, too, are no accident. In the millions of years in which our brains were being designed by evolution, the greater our status relative to the people around us, the better able we'd be to maximise our potential for survival and reproduction.

Back in the Stone Age, increased status meant access to better mates, more food and greater safety for ourselves and our offspring. It still does today. So we're driven to seek connection and rank: to be accepted into groups and win status within them. This is the game of human life.

In the developed world, we play political games; religious games; corporate games; sports games; cult games; legal games; fashion games; hobby games; computer games; charity games; social media games; racial, gender and nationalist games. The variety feels infinite. Within these groups, we strive for individual status—acclaim from our co-players. But our groups also compete with rival groups in status contests. When our games win status, we do too. When they lose, so do we. These games form our identity. We become the games we play.

We play for status, if only subtly, with every social interaction, every contribution we make to work, love or family life and every internet post. We play with how we dress, how we speak and what we believe. We play with our lives—with the story we tell of our past and our dreams and plans for the future.

Life isn't only driven by status. We're also motivated by other grand drives. We want power. We want sex. We want wealth. We want to change society for the better. But all these wants are best satisfied by playing the status game. If you want to rule the world, save the world, buy the world or fuck the world, the best thing to pursue is status.

Crucially, whilst we play life as a game, our conscious experience of it takes the form of a story. The brain feeds us distorted, simplistic and self-serving tales about why others are above us or are beneath. In this way, complex truths become reduced to cartoonish moral struggles between good and evil. We're all vulnerable to believing such narratives. They form our experience of reality. They make us feel better about ourselves; they motivate us to strive to improve our rank. But they're delusional.

When asked why we do the things we do, we rarely say, It's because of status. I really love it.' To admit to being motivated by improving our rank is to risk making others think less of us, which loses us rank. Even admitting it to ourselves can make us feel reduced. So our awareness of our desire for status eats itself.

One study of more than sixty thousand people across 123 countries found people's wellbeing 'consistently depended on the degree to which people felt respected by others'. Attainment of status or its loss was 'the strongest predictor of long-term positive and negative feelings'.

'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 youngsters in lower ranking families miss out on.

‘The people most likely to survive to old age were those with solid face-to-face relationships', writes psychologist Susan Pinker. Their social relationships, or lack of them, 'predicted mortality, independently of how healthy, well-to-do, or physically fit' they were.

Workers 'at the bottom of the office hierarchy have, at ages forty to sixty-four, 4 times the risk of death of the administrators at the top of the hierarchy'. This remained true with every step you took up or down the game. The lower you dropped, the worse your health and the earlier your death. 'The group second from the top has higher mortality than those above them in the ranking.'