The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It

Whilst we play life as a game, our conscious experience of it takes the form of a story.

Researchers find our reward systems are activated most when we achieve relative rather than absolute rewards; we’re designed to feel best not when we get more, but when we get more than those around us.

The actual world is monochrome and silent. Sounds, colours, tastes and smells exist only in the projection in our heads. What’s actually out there are vibrating particles, floating chemical compounds, molecules and colourless light waves of varying lengths. Our perceptions of these phenomena are special effects in a brain-generated movie. And our senses can only detect the tiniest fraction of what’s out there. Our eyes, for instance, are able to pick up less than one ten-trillionth of the available light spectrum.

when we become depressed we ‘mentally withdraw from the competition for higher status’.

The story idealists sometimes tell of humanity says we're natural seekers of equality. This isn't true. Utopians talk of injustice whilst building new hierarchies and placing themselves at the top. We all do this. It's in our nature. The urge for rank is ineradicable. It's the secret goal of our lives, to win status for ourselves and our game - and gain as much of it over you and you and you as we can. It's how we make meaning. It's how we make identity. It's the worst of us, it's the best of us and it's the inescapable truth of us: for humans, equality will always be the impossible dream.

We build an infinite variety of imaginary games. Groups of people gather together, agree what symbols they’re going to use to mean “status,” then strive to achieve it.

an experiment in which participants played in three online worlds: Blueprint, Nicholas Christakis (Little Brown, 2019), p. 108.

Whenever people use a word so often that they abbreviate it, it is clearly central to their moral and emotional vocabulary.

The Christians conjured hell, which generated salvation anxiety, then presented their game as the only way to escape it. Similarly, New Left activists threaten hell by radically rewriting the terms by which accusations of bigotry can be made, lowering the bar such that mere whiteness or masculinity are signs of guilt. Having generated salvation anxiety, they present their movement as the sole available remedy. Hell’s threat can only be escaped with conspicuous, zealous and highly correct play.