It is typically assumed that status is a zero-sum game. In a way, this is self-evident: status exists within a hierarchy and one’s high status is only meaningful relative to another’s low or average status. By definition, not everyone can be ‘high status’ in the same way that everyone can be materially richer. (Of course, wealth is one way to convert money into status, a la luxury brands, conspicuous consumption etc.)
This is mostly true! This applies readily to the ‘mainstream’ hierarchies that we almost inevitably find ourselves in (workplace, family, “broader society” etc.). Human are social creatures and we (subconsciously) try to understand the status hierarchy in any given social situations.[1] We also know that status has an impact on mortality/life expectancy (NB literally a random link I found on Google).
But, we also voluntarily choose to be part of many communities, which can allocate status very differently from those communities we are inevitably a part of. We can participate in hobbies (e.g. pottery class, collecting stamps etc.) or find our sub-communities online (e.g. rationalist movement, Hacker News, etc.). Theoretically, the number of such communities can be limitless, especially in today’s Internet Age (just look at the diversity of subreddits), and it is possible for someone at the bottom of one pecking order to be above-average in another.
There is also something to be said about the size/topography of different communities. Larger communities are probably likelier to lead to finer status distinctions and hence unhappiness (there is always a more physically attractive person on Instagram seemingly having a cooler life), whereas smaller communities are probably more egalitarian (harking back to our hunter-gatherer days).
I wish to push back on the ‘status as a zero-sum game’ critique, even while staying within a materialist framing. Often, zero-sum games can have positive externalities. A bad example is probably the Cold War: the zero-sum political/military contest between the US and the USSR generated a great deal of technological innovations that subsequently found civilian applications (e.g. the GPS). This is a bad example because it came at the risk of nuclear holocaust. A good example is probably the Wikipedia community, which managed its status-allocation among contributors/editors in a way that resulted in huge positive externalities. More generally, the middle-class impulse to ‘keep up with the Jones’ is probably one of the largest, unspoken forces driving society to create ever more wealth, which is mostly a good thing.
Traditional wisdom states that comparison is the death of joy. Religions counsel us to be grateful for what we do have. Envy is for the foolish and the unhappy. We should instead hold ourselves to absolute, rather than relative, standards and focus on positive-sum games, in which my gain is not your loss.
I still think this is mostly right and is an underrated corrective heuristic that should be adopted by more people. Modern society is still mostly too materialistic and people probably overestimate the difference additional wealth will make to their lives.
But after reading High Output Management’s take on employee motivation, I realize a world in which everyone rigorously adhere to such a heuristic would be materially much poorer. As Grove puts it:
At the lower levels of the motivation hierarchy, money is obviously important, needed to buy the necessities of life. Once there is enough money to bring a person up to a level he expects of himself, more money will not motivate. Consider people who work at our assembly plant in the Caribbean. The standard of living there is quite low, and people who work for us enjoy one substantially higher than most of the population. Yet, in the early years of operation, many employees worked just long enough to accumulate some small sum of money and then quit. For them, money’s motivation was clearly limited; having reached a predetermined notion of how much money they wanted, more money and a steady job provided no more motivation.
[…]
Money in the physiological- and security-driven modes only motivates until the need is satisfied, but money as a measure of achievement will motivate without limit.
In summary, a good advice would be to avoid the status game and, if you must, invest greater personal meaning in status games that you can win. Make the sheer number of possible status games work in your favor.
An even better (Buddhist) advice would be to find peace from within, rather than from status games.
But maybe inner peace is overrated. From the perspective of societal progress, the best advice is to embrace (possibly zero-sum) divine discontent and use that as a motivation to win at (positive-sum) games.
[1] I vaguely recall reading a take that goes: Western society now is rhetorically more ‘equal’ than ever, yet this equality is driving much of the outrage/call-out culture, as people seek to reinstate the differentiation/hierarchies that are more apparent in aristocratic societies. Almost seems Girardian…