<story><title>Pursuing status will never bring true happiness</title><url>https://every.to/no-small-plans/the-status-trap</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tqi</author><text>On the one hand, sure, status probably is a trap and won&amp;#x27;t bring &amp;quot;true happiness.&amp;quot; And I think this is well meaning advice.&lt;p&gt;But on the other hand, I think it&amp;#x27;s possible that an Ivy League educated founder&amp;#x2F;VC partner&amp;#x2F;executive coach might not be in the best position to see the whole picture. To paraphrase the Aviator[1], you don&amp;#x27;t care about status because you&amp;#x27;ve always had it. I think that for many people who have experienced precarity, rather than being driven by vanity, this pursuit of status is a rational way to increase security.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;youtu.be&amp;#x2F;br-ljup5Bow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;youtu.be&amp;#x2F;br-ljup5Bow&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Barrin92</author><text>I come from a pretty precarious background but through circumstance and luck I&amp;#x27;ve ended up in much higher status environments from a fairly young age. (private school, later tech jobs)&lt;p&gt;The one thing I always cared more about than a lot of kids was money but not status. People who grow up poor tend to really be aware of how much it sucks to not have money. You see it in entrepreneurs in China or former Eastern bloc countries. People who grew up in insecurity tend to be very conscious about access to resources and are very competitive.&lt;p&gt;But status is a different thing. Most people who come from precarious backgrounds in my opinion hate status games because the people who play them the most are anxious upper-middle class people afraid of falling downwards. I think I&amp;#x27;ve probably harmed my career prospects by just being allergic to networking or not going to posh events because of how fake they seem.&lt;p&gt;Also important to point out that status is a complex thing in the sense that a lot of high status people are &amp;quot;performatively broke&amp;quot; because that&amp;#x27;s paradoxically the only way to flex even more if you&amp;#x27;re rich (tech CEOS living in crap houses and sleeping on old mattresses etc), so that makes advice like this even more complicated because it&amp;#x27;s difficult to tell if it&amp;#x27;s genuine.</text></comment>
<story><title>Pursuing status will never bring true happiness</title><url>https://every.to/no-small-plans/the-status-trap</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tqi</author><text>On the one hand, sure, status probably is a trap and won&amp;#x27;t bring &amp;quot;true happiness.&amp;quot; And I think this is well meaning advice.&lt;p&gt;But on the other hand, I think it&amp;#x27;s possible that an Ivy League educated founder&amp;#x2F;VC partner&amp;#x2F;executive coach might not be in the best position to see the whole picture. To paraphrase the Aviator[1], you don&amp;#x27;t care about status because you&amp;#x27;ve always had it. I think that for many people who have experienced precarity, rather than being driven by vanity, this pursuit of status is a rational way to increase security.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;youtu.be&amp;#x2F;br-ljup5Bow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;youtu.be&amp;#x2F;br-ljup5Bow&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>geodel</author><text>True. The way I see is one category of people who would need first hand experience to know status really matters or not. They wouldn&amp;#x27;t find this advice much useful. But there is other group who would rather take the word of someone with status to believe status doesn&amp;#x27;t matter if they are saying so. Simply because they have status so they know better about it.&lt;p&gt;I think at core most of advice from &lt;i&gt;haves&lt;/i&gt; to &lt;i&gt;have nots&lt;/i&gt; has different effect on smart vs average &lt;i&gt;have nots&lt;/i&gt;. Smarts tend to see a kind of hypocrisy in these proclamations. Whereas average folks just see the real world the way it is. So these advise seems useful info coming from important people.</text></comment>