Why do we always want more?
The awkward truth, is that it's a natural desire. Because more is about status. And status is a core, but complicated, need.
At the time of acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk’s net worth was estimated to be $250bn. Billion, with a ‘b’. Alongside his phenomenal wealth he has built famous and generally celebrated companies like Tesla, SpaceX and PayPal. Since the acquisition, the value of Twitter has dropped from $44bn, to a third of that ($15bn).
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, is worth approximately $110bn. Give or a take a few billion. And he and Elon Musk, two of the wealthiest men to have ever lived, have challenged each other to a cage fight1. Yes, a fight inside a metal structure while presumably wearing silky shorts.
In 2009, Tiger Woods was the world’s first sports billionaire, and was well on his way to becoming the greatest golfer the game had ever seen. And then he had an affair with a nightclub manager and crashed his car into a tree when confronted by his wife.
The world we live in today sees CEO pay that has skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978: CEOs were paid 399 times as much as a typical worker in 20212.
I have a desperate question in my mind:
Why do we always want more?
In our own daily lives, we chase the pursuit of things readily and regularly. The latest shoes, the newest brands, the flashiest gadgets, the slickest car, completing the latest trend, heralding our own physical efforts or exertions. And alongside this all we parade our acquisitions on social media, searching for recognition and acknowledgement of these efforts:
Look! I got the thing. Over here! We did the thing.
Why does enough, all too often, never feel like it?
The answer is status. And more specifically, the extent to which we believe our status within a group allows us sufficient access to the resources we and our family need to survive.
The honest, somewhat ugly, truth is that this desire is embedded within us. Deeply.
For the majority of our evolution across hundreds of thousands of years, humans have lived as a tribal species. Hunting and gathering together, building campfires to congregate around and ward off predators, establishing small villages and communities.
As a result, our personal survival has depended on being accepted into a supportive community. We know intuitively that sticking together as a group will increase our chances of survival against the elements, predators, starvation and disease.
Being part of a group gives us access to resources and a selection of potential mates. It’s a fundamental aspect of human life, and staying alive. But once we’re part of a group, we’re rarely content to simply exist on its lowest rungs.
Having enhanced status within a group gives us access to more resources, or better ones. It gives us access to what we might perceive to be preferential mates. And, over time, greater security for ourselves and our family.
When we are confident that we have access to this level of resource, we are able to feel a certain level of comfort. Status isn’t about being liked or accepted, it is about feeling a level of confidence that your level of influence will allow you reliable access to what you and your family need. In this way, status is a core human need. It’s why when people defer to us, or allow us to influence them in some way, it feels good. That feeling is one that says “you’re valuable to this group, and we will reward that value with access to resources”.
It’s the reason why research has consistently found that people in social groups and those who feel respected by others consistently have higher levels of well-being. A wide range of research finds people with depression tend to belong to ‘far fewer’ groups than the rest of the population. Studies across time suggest that the more a depressed person identifies with their group – the more of their own sense of self they invest in it – the more their depressive symptoms lift.
But the other side of the status coin, is that status is relative.
In an age of scarcity - where resources are limited - status is necessarily relative to others. For the vast bulk of human evolution, this has been the case. We’ve lived in perpetual fear of there simply not being enough in terms of food, shelter, or other people to look after us if we fall ill or get injured. If I have access to a particular resource in a group, you have access to less, and my odds of survival increase.
Simply put, there is nothing else we are more scared of, at our core fight-or-flight level of existence that exists within all of, than losing status and therefore - in our animal minds - losing access to resources.
These embedded ways of being have taught us an enduring lesson; that status is a game. We need to ‘get along and get ahead’ in order to maintain our own access to resources and mates within the groups we find ourselves. Or else suffer the consequences.
In Will Storr’s excellent book and inspiration behind this post, The Status Game, he discusses the importance of status, or the lack thereof:
It’s probably not a surprise to discover that feeling deprived of status is a major source of anxiety and depression. When life is a game we’re losing, we hurt. One review of the scientific literature found that ‘perceiving oneself as having low rank compared to others is consistently linked to higher depressive symptoms’.
Some psychologists argue that when we become depressed we ‘mentally withdraw from the competition for higher status’. This keeps us off ‘high- status individuals’ radars’ and conserves energy, helping us cope with the ‘reduced opportunities imposed by low status’. Frequent defeat in the status game has us scuttling off to the grey safety of the back of the cave. In the sanctuary of those shadows, our inner monologue can turn on us, becoming hypercritical in a process known as self- subordination. We talk ourselves down in an onslaught of insult, convincing ourselves the fight is useless, that we belong at the bottom, that we can only ever fail.
…Suicide is encouraged not just by falling, but by falling behind….
Status is an essential nutrient found not in meat or fruit or sunlight but in the successful playing of our lives. When we feel chronically deprived of it, or disconnected from the game, our minds and bodies can turn against us. To our brains, status is a resource as real as oxygen or water. When we lose it, we break.
We can’t help but play these status games. When we start a new job, we do it with our colleagues, in attempts to figure out where we might sit on the totem pole, and how to climb it. On our sports teams, during a pub quiz, when we join a conversation with people we don’t know, we do the same, subtly vying for position and working out where we might lie. Because in life, there’s always little voice buried deep within us that says “If shit kicks off and we need to grab for the resources, how will the chips fall for me? What will I end up with?”
And the challenge is, because of status’ deeply embedded nature, we do this in everything we do. Having status in one realm, doesn’t prevent us from trying to capture status in another if we feel that the culture around us is shifting to value it. It’s why Elon Musk wasn’t happy being the richest man in the world and founder of multiple companies, because he didn’t feel that he had enough status in the world of public opinion. So, he bought Twitter to try to rectify that.
It’s why Zuckerberg wants to fight him. Because he feels he doesn’t have enough status in the world of physical ability, despite having access to all the resources he and his future generations will ever need to think about.
Tiger Woods, having conquered the golfing world, sought status in sexual conquests because he had been conditioned to believe this is what gets you status through his father’s infidelities.
We can’t help it. We seek status. But what should we be seeking status in?
These status driven games made sense and served valid purposes in the age of scarcity. They gave us the motivation to find ways that we could meaningfully contribute to a tribe in order to elevate our status, and gain influence and access to resources. Deciding what we should seek status in used to be simpler when it was more closely linked to our fundamental survival requirements.
Be a great hunter or gatherer so you can provide for yourself and others, be known as honest so others can trust you, be a good listener, or healer, or protector, or fighter, or storyteller, or entertainer. These games drove us to develop habits that benefited the tribe, for the most part. It was easier to work out the cause and effect of status games. We found food, and people ate. We spread word of approaching danger, and others trusted us. We built fire, and provided warmth and protection for those around us.
These used to make sense on a fundamental level when resources to survive were scarce, but we’re no longer in an age of scarcity.
Despite the current cost-of-living crises that have gripped many parts of the world, we are undeniably living in an age of abundance. Ours has become a creaking structure of the abundance of consumption; content, media, junk food, alcohol, clothes, watches, cars, fuel. We produce enough food in the world to feed every person on the planet3, but as many as 10% of the world’s population is still impacted by hunger4.
And not only are we surrounded by these excesses, but we’ve created an environment where we can indulge mostly on our own if we choose to do so. We’ve become less reliant on the tribes around us to satiate our core needs, and retreated in amongst ourselves.
Or, at least, these are the stories we’ve told ourselves. We’re self-reliant. Self-made. Western culture in particular has hero’d the rise of individualism, promoting self-sufficiency as an ultimate ideal to strive for.
In our attempts to carve our own paths, we’ve forgotten the tribes that trod the way to our starting points.
Living in an age of abundance makes it increasingly harder to figure out where we should be directing our efforts to gain status. And the world around us knows this all too well.
“Social media follower counts will give you status!”
“Phillipe Patek watches / A Lamborghini / Balenciaga shoes will give you status!”
“IG posts at Glastonbury / A Just Stop Oil protest / Wimbledon centre court will give you status!”
Here’s the point: none of the above examples are wrong; they will provide status in some form. And the instinct behind them - to gain status - is natural. Just like you, I play these status games every day. We cannot opt out of them. Doing so only harms us. But we can, and must, choose which games we play, and how. And that’s never been more important than in the age of abundance.
If we don’t think about the games we play, our environment will choose for us. And currently, for many people, it’s selecting individual games that contribute little to the tribe, unsurprisingly leaving too many to feel like it’s not enough. Because it isn’t.
I believe Elon Musk started off with a quest for status in games of virtue in his endeavors to drive human exploration in space, technology and alternative transport. But over time, his success has steered him into status games of dominance and power in the fields of public opinion.
It’s foolish to imagine that we can ignore status and its games. We will play them. But in our modern world that’s full of countless status games to play, it’s never become more important to become intentional about the ones we participate in. The importance of actively choosing what, how and when we participate in them is greater than any one of us, and our tribes depend on it. The tribes we exist within.
As I unpack these themes over the coming weeks, I will leave you with these three Sunday thoughts, and would love to hear any examples in the comments below:
What status games do you play most often?
Why do you think you play them?
What does playing them give to your tribe?
And, as is only fair, I’ll go first with an example:
The Grey Life is a status game that I play. It is my attempt to stake my play for status in an ability to question the way of the world around us.
I play it because it is a precise extension, and goal, of one of my core values: Be Curious. This value brings immense meaning and motivation to my life. I feel more content when I am curious about the world around me.
I believe sharing these might inspire those in my tribe, you, to possibly for the briefest of moments, consider the world through a different lens. And, even if you disagree, encouraging a diversity of thought in my view is good for us all.
[I could have written about any number of other games, like how I prefer to wear t-shirts to the office in gain status in the world of rejecting commercial norms, but I didn’t. I chose to write about the more virtuous one. Because we are all a summary of the stories we tell ourselves, and status lies at the heart of that.]
Have a Grey week,
Chris
Bonus material: Have you ever wondered what the point of self discovery is? Does it all too often sound like an indulgent, pointless exercise? It can be, but when you take the time and courage to invest into it, incredible outcomes lie within its grasp. Here’s a conversation tackling just that: PODCAST - Is the journey to self discovery pointless?