The Status Game

The global rise of social media is one of the major societal events of our lifetimes. If we view the human condition from a conventional perspective, it makes about as much sense as very fast running. What’s the point? Putting pictures of your tanned knees on the internet, why bother? Arguing with strangers over micro-disagreements concerning issues that’ll never affect you, what a waste of time. But if we understand ourselves not as heroes on journeys but as biological machines designed to play symbolic games of status wherever we go, the success of social media not only makes sense, it feels inevitable.

Living the neoliberal dream, with its galaxy of signals of failure, appears to be making us more perfectionistic. Further powerful evidence that altering the rules of our status games changes who we are can be found in a study of more than forty thousand students across the USA, Britain and Canada. Led by psychologist Dr Thomas Curran, the researchers discovered all the forms of perfectionism they looked at had risen between 1989 and 2016. Social perfectionism had grown the most. The extent to which people felt they had to ‘display perfection to secure approval’ had soared by 32 per cent. They concluded, ‘young people are perceiving that their social context is increasingly demanding, that others judge them more harshly, and that they are increasingly inclined to display perfection as a means of securing approval’. In speculating why, the authors pointed to neoliberalism. They noted the Western nations under study had ‘become more individualistic, materialistic, and socially antagonistic over this period, with young people now facing more competitive environments, more unrealistic expectations, and more anxious and controlling parents than generations before’. Both social perfectionism and materialistic goal-seeking have been linked to a witchbag of psychological maladies, including depression, anxiety, eating disorders and self-harm, rates of which have been climbing in recent years, especially in the young.

There’s an injurious mismatch between the design of our brains and the vast and vastly unequal games that comprise neoliberal life. Status is relative: the amount we feel we have depends on how much we perceive others have. Much of our status play happens in gargantuan corporate reinventions of tribe. Today, sixty-nine of the hundred largest economies on earth are not nations but corporations. In the first quarter of 2021 alone, technology company Apple made more money than the annual GDP of 135 countries; its market valuation was higher than the GDP of Italy, Brazil, Canada, South Korea and Russia. It’s all too easy, in these modern-colossal hierarchies, to feel as if we’re failing, even as we provide food, shelter and security for our families that’s ample. To live in the neoliberal dreamworld is to suffer some form of status anxiety. It’s standard. It’s who we are and how we play.

Reduce your moral sphere – Some forms of status are easier to win than others. For those of us who aren’t pretty, virtue is probably the easiest to find of all. It’s as simple as judging people: because status is relative, their de-grading raises us up, if only in our minds. Smartphones and social media have placed global virtue games inside our pockets. Winning this form of status is now more convenient than ever. But it costs, not least in the misery it can cause others, especially when it’s blended with dominance. Many of us could benefit from consciously reducing our moral sphere. How much time do you devote to the judging of other people? How much cheap and tainted status do you grab for yourself by doing so? Reducing our moral sphere means casting our eyes inwards, concerning ourselves mostly with our own behaviour instead of that of others. It means ceasing the casual condemnation of distant players living different dreams which we refuse to understand and are all too easy to belittle and hate.