Horny for status

Why does status turn us on?

I came across the idea of “forever drafts” on Kyle Kowalski’s website last week, and I loved the idea. The term perfectly captures the essence of this blog as well—always exploring, never done. All the posts I’ve written so far have been forever drafts because I keep adding to them in each subsequent post. Another way to think about forever drafts is as a digital garden or your own magical place on the interweb where you nurture your curiosities and wonders. This is one of those forever drafts.

A couple of weeks ago, I started listening to Will Storr on The Joe Rogan Experience.

Will Storr is an author and journalist whom I discovered a few years ago when I wanted to learn about storytelling and why we are addicted to stories. He had written a book titled The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human, and How to Tell Them Better—another book that’s waiting eagerly on my bookshelf for my tender touch. This is a perfect depiction of the size of my reading regrets.

Anyway, I heard Storr talk about the role that status plays in our world, and I was hooked. So I did some reading and listening, and I wanted to share some ideas that I’d learned so far. It goes without saying that there’s only so much that one can learn in a week or two, so this post is more of a forever draft than a perfect synthesis.

We all have intuitive models for understanding the world. We are more or less blank slates when we are born, and we build models to understand the world. As we grow, we learn that the world is more complex than our young brains assume, and we update our models. We live happy lives if we keep updating our models and are fucked the moment we stop.

Like models, I think we all have intuitive filters for making sense of people and the world at large. The way I think about filters is as frames for thinking that operate at a lower abstraction than complex models. Filters are much less complex than models with fewer inputs. Think of them as rules of thumb.

Filters can be handy because they are a shortcut for making sense of a situation. Whether we know it or not, we all use filters, such as incentives, identity, the human need for connection, our desire for certainty, and so on. When you look at human behavior through these filters, the reasons behind why people do something or act in a certain way become apparent. Status is one such filter.

I’m not a big fan of things that purport to explain the world. Listening to various people talk about status, it felt like these experts think that status can explain all or most human behavior. I think human behavior is far more complex than can be explained by one or two variables. Having said that, there’s no denying that status plays a significant role in influencing human behavior.

Dark energy makes up 68% of the known universe, while dark matter makes up 27%.  Yet, we’ve never seen or detected either of these. But because of how the universe behaves, we know they exist through inference. Status is much like dark energy and matter. It conceals itself in plain sight, manipulating our behavior like a puppet master. A lot of our daily activities are influenced by our status without our being aware of it. But once you’re aware, it’s hard not to see status everywhere.

Status is a fundamental human motive,similar to lust, hunger, fear, and disgust. The desire for status is universal in both humans and animals. Status likely arose from evolutionary selection pressures. Women prefer men with higher status, and hence men evolved to seek status.

Men with higher status got access to better mating partners, offspring, food, territory, and other privileges. In fact, our emotions like fear, pride, shame, anger, and envy seem to be linked to relative status differences. Status is like the air we breathe and the water we drink. It’s so important for our well-being that both men and women have been known to deliberately destroy the character of others in order to make them less desirable to others.

Higher status gives people the ability to choose from a wider pool of potential mates than they would if they have low status. And so one of the reasons that people strive for status is because they have access to more desirable mates. Conversely, having desirable mates endows you with higher status. And so if you’re a male, you have a very attractive woman on your arm, that leads to high status. And so there’s a reciprocal link between status and mating in that way.

Women more than men prioritized good earning capacity, slightly older age, and the qualities associated with resource acquisition. So, these are things like a man’s social status. Does he have drive? Is he ambitious? Does he have a good long-term resource trajectory, is one way that I like to phrase it, because women often don’t look at necessarily the resources that a guy possesses at this moment, but what is his trajectory? — David Buss, one of the founding fathers of evolutionary psychology.

One of the fascinating things I learned is that humans spent much of their history in small, egalitarian groups. We started forming social hierarchies only about 12,000 years ago as we transitioned from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to agricultural societies. Egalitarianism defies logic when you consider the fact that we kill for status. But it’s precisely through killing that we may have self-domesticated ourselves.

We like dominating and hate being dominated. So, egalitarianism may have emerged as this uneasy compromise—it’s better not to be dominated if dominating others isn’t an option. Cooperation also emerged naturally as our nomadic ancestors realized that working together was better for survival than going at it alone. Once our ancestors realized the benefits of cooperation, they attached status to it to make it a desirable trait.

They were vigilant about people trying to dominate. Whenever someone sought to dominate others, the weaker members banded together to kill the alpha male. The invention of weapons also tamed people’s desires to dominate others.

Some hunter-gatherer groups resort to insults to control people’s egos. The Ju/’hoansi people of the Kalahari insult tribe members who had big kills. This way, the tribe members don’t let success get to their heads.”

But our status-seeking impulses couldn’t be shackled for long. As soon as we transitioned to agrarian societies, they exploded. We started hoarding resources and dominating others. Today, we signal status in everything from the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the way we walk, the words we use, the jobs we do, and the wealth we accumulate.

We also engage in elaborate and pointless rituals in the form of lavish weddings and fancy parties to signal our status. If there are aliens looking at our behavior from afar, they’d be laughing their asses off at our social pageantry to display status.

We are belonging animals

Humans are social creatures, and we need others to survive. Cooperation emerged as a result of survival pressures in hunter-gatherer societies once people learned that group efforts had greater benefits than solo efforts. Since then, our desire to belong has been constant.

You might have read the exaggerated claim that being lonely is like smoking 15 cigarettes a day. While the claim may be sensational, there’s plenty of evidence to show that loneliness increases the risk of premature death. We are hardwired to avoid loneliness and isolation. We’ll do anything to belong, including being part of cults that ask us to cut off our balls and have sex with strangers.

Will Storr: Nobody has any idea how the world works until they plug into a group. And the group has its stories that it tells about how the world works. Every group has its model of what a hero is and this set of beliefs a hero has. And once we’ve plugged into that group, we orient ourselves towards becoming that person.

And cults are interesting because cults are like all human groups, kind of cults, but looser. Every human group is a status game in the sense that it’s a group of people who believe the same things. And there’s sort of rules for being part of that group. And the better you become at following those rules and becoming its ideal of self, the higher you rise up that status game.

The only difference between a cult and a religion and a business and a political group is just that it’s much tighter. So the rules are much stricter. Like there’s a zillion rules, like I’ve written before about what they call what was the cult that they castrated themselves.

It’s so weird that we’re the same creatures that went to the moon and believe nutjobs that say we can go to heaven on an alien spaceship. Our need to belong makes us blind to everything. We tend to believe even the absurdest of things because it cures isolation. Once we are part of something, we’re rewarded with status, and this further reinforces human stupidity.

Will Storr: And when they look at the psychology of people that are vulnerable to falling into cults, it’s very often people that have struggled to fit into the status games of ordinary life. So the family hasn’t worked, the job hasn’t worked. Exactly. Hobbies haven’t worked, so they’ve got no identity, they’ve got no tribe. So they’re really vulnerable to these cults, which, because what cults offer is absolute certainty.

Willing actors and unwitting slaves

One of my favorite parts of the podcast was when Storr invoked Sartre.

Will Storr: Yeah. John Paul Sartre wrote about this. He called it bad faith. And he was sitting in a cafe in Paris at one time, and he was watching the waiter, and he realized that the waiter was just behaving like a waiter, like a classic parisian waiter. He’s going, look at his movement, and he’s just really annoying. John Paul Sartre, he’s acting in bad faith. He’s doing the dance of the waiter. That’s not really who he is, right. He’s just being the waiter. And he said, there’s the dance of the auctioneer. There’s the dance of the used car salesman. And that’s kind of what we do.

Joe Rogan: The dance of the strip club DJ.

Will Storr: And the dance of the member of the cult

Joe Rogan: Thedance of the lead singer of a rock and roll band.

Will Storr: That’s what the brain does, though. It identifies. Okay, what group am I in? What does a hero look like?

I had written about Sartre in a previous post. He was an existentialist philosopher who believed that existence precedes essence, meaning we exist first and then make our meaning. He’s the patron saint of radical freedom. He argued that there is no higher power responsible for our actions, and that we must make our own choices and author our fate.

In one of his books, Sartre used the example of a waiter immersed in his role to explain the concept of “bad faith.” Sartre says that the waiter, by fully identifying with his role, has lost his sense of self and made being a waiter his identity. By engaging in this self-deception, he’s denying his freedom and acting in bad faith. Sartre exhorted people to be original and live life on their own terms.

We do this in our own lives, too. We crumble under social pressures and conform because we don’t want to be ostracized. We adopt facades and manufacture identities because it helps us feel like we belong and gain status. We unconsciously become slaves to the human tendency to mimic and imitate others, losing our identities.

Moar, moar, moar

One of the great tragedies of our times is that it’s almost impossible to think about what’s our enough. Our society and our economy are set up in such a way that it takes almost a revolutionary act to say, “That’s enough for me.” There’s no balance in anything anymore. Everything is a game, and we’ve got to play it. We’ve all become commodities, and we must exploit ourselves at all times; otherwise, we lose points.

Joe Rogan:We just have this real weird desire to never stop making more. Like, a real weird desire to maximize profit, expand, expand, make it big. Nobody ever has a company and goes, “We’re good. Just like, leave it like this.”

Will Storr:That’s because status is relative, right? So you’re always insecure about your status. It’s this imaginary resource. It only exists in our minds and in the minds of other people. You can’t keep it. You can’t put it in a box. So you’re constantly having to make sure that it’s still there. It’s still there. You’re constantly measuring your state. Like Apple is measuring their status versus Google and Samsung or whoever. So there’s that constant chippiness. You’re always trying to ratchet up.

There was this really hilarious study they did where they got a bunch of multiple millionaires and billionaires, and they asked them, how much more money would you need to be perfectly happy? And uniformly, they said, between two and three times more money. And it’s like, you’re not going to be perfectly happy. You’re delusional.

But that’s the human brain. So we think, well, when I’ve achieved this thing, I’ll be perfectly happy. But of course, we’re happy for about 10 seconds. Then we want the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. And actually, it’s exhausting, but it’s also how we built civilization. It’s also an incredible, amazing thing that we’re restless, we’re never satisfied.

We want better and better and better and better. Like, it drives us forward.

I loved the nuance in the last paragraph. Not saying enough is responsible for the progress of mankind but also for making men miserable.

The idea of “enough” reminded me of a podcast featuring two legends: Stephen Fry and John Cleese, which I had written about in a previous post. In the podcast, Stephen Fry says that our desire for “more” is a hole that can never be filled. That vivid metaphor is etched into my brain.

Stepehn Fry: Well, you’re probably a generation older. You didn’t have quite… No, there was a… But they were so… You were being prepared for cocaine and tobacco, essentially. You were given white powder and tobacco, and I never could eat enough of that, and I would break out of school bans, go to the village shop, and buy all the fruit salads and Black Jacks and foamy shrimps and little rice paper flying saucers, and I stuffed myself. I couldn’t eat them. I… I got teeth missing here because of it.

So I… I had this empty hole in me, this vast empty hole that said, “Feed me. I need this sugar. I need it.” And then when it wasn’t sugar, it became tobacco, and I smoked. And then in my 20s, it became cocaine. I just… And I couldn’t sit still without going, you know, and it’s that addictive impulse that many people, many people watching will know what I mean. And many people won’t because this is the important thing to remember. I said, “Not everybody has this.” And it’s a kind of addictive gene. And I guess the money people have it for money. There’s this hole in them they have to acquire and they have to own.

John Cleese: They don’t know how to fill it, no. And they think if I had another 500 million, I’d be happier.

I heard the amazing Rob Henderson say something counterintuitive about status. He said that the rich care more about maintaining or increasing their status than the poor. It seemed weird to me at first, but then it made sense once I realized status is relative.

Rob Henderson: This has been found in a couple of different studies now that in the US, the interest in obtaining status is correlated with current social status. So in other words, the higher status you happen to be in terms of income, occupational prestige, and so on, the more interested those people tend to be in either preserving or enhancing their status.

This to was a little bit counterintuitive, because, you know, I guess I would have predicted in advance, maybe the people who were sort of at the bottom, who maybe don’t have much status, don’t have much influence, or wealth, that those would be the people most interested in sort of obtaining it and gaining more of it.

But it’s actually the people at the top who are most interested in social status, which I think, like for me, that put a lot of puzzle pieces into place, based on sort of the anxiety that I saw among sort of top college students and top graduates.

We are always benchmarking ours against others, and that’s what drives our desire for more. It’s a bit like loss aversion, or the idea that losses hurt twice as much as gains. To avoid the pain of losing status, we constantly seek more relative to our peer groups.

Status is the lubricant of capitalism

It’s fashionable to dunk on capitalism, and I’m not past it. But here’s a fascinating and provocative take on why capitalism, with all its flaws and destructive externalities, works better than all the other isms.

Will Storr: You take people’s status away. Years ago, I went to Poland to do some reporting on, like at the time, the big story in the UK was all these Polish people coming to the UK to do all this. So I remember that, yeah, where’s all the Polish people come from? So I went to Poland to find out where all the Polish people had come from, and we went to this old steelworks, this old sort of Stalin-era steelworks. And the Polish journalist who was my fixer said, “Oh, I just mentioned casually how the Poles are such hard workers.” And she was like, “We’re not hard workers, we’re lazy. I can’t believe that you Brits think we’re hard workers.” And she said, “We’ve got this post-Soviet mindset.”

So I said, “Well, what do you mean, the post-Soviet mindset?” And she said, “Well, when everyone’s getting paid anyway, you’re not motivated to do any work. So in a steelworks like this, nobody would do any work. And if somebody came in all enthusiastic and ambitious, they’d be bullied to fuck until they calmed down and stopped doing work. That was how it worked.” And there was a phrase like, “You can turn up for work or you can not turn up for work, you’re still going to get paid.”

Removing that stuff from human society removes something that we need, which is individual status. If you don’t reward individual status, you don’t motivate people to contribute to work. And that’s partly why communism collapsed, because it’s incompatible with human nature. Like, capitalism is the only system that we’ve got that is compatible with human nature. It rewards the status instinct.

Speaking to Cecilia Ridgewood, the author of Status: Why Is It Everywhere? Why Does It Matter? on the The Ezra Klein Show, substitute host Rogé Karma says:

One way to think about capitalism, for all of its faults, is as an attempt to channel individual status ambitions towards the improvement of collective living standards, when we say, as a society, that we’re going to give you tons of money and therefore status for developing vaccines, or producing electric vehicles at scale, or creating a bunch of jobs, then we can really supercharge that behavior. You can think of meritocracy in this way.

This observation about capitalism by Rogé Karma leads to a discussion about capitalism and its downsides. Karma highlights the fact that money has become a key marker of status in American society. He goes on to say that this obsession with money has led to a distorted situation where teachers earn a fraction of what investment bankers make. The tragedy is that investment bankers also have higher status than teachers.

He gives two fascinating examples of how status games can be set up for the better. In Singapore, public servants earn generous salaries, making government jobs status markers. In the same way, Finland places a premium on teaching, which means their teaching programs are as competitive as other programs at US Ivy League universities.

Professor Ridgeway adds that policy tools can imbue things with status and make them cool. She gives the example of the Kennedy administration’s goal of going to the moon. Since it was a national priority, working on the space mission became a status symbol, making it a magnet for the best talent.

Status addiction

I mentioned that loneliness kills us; the same is true of status. A lack of status can kill us. Storr cites the famous White Hall study, which found that people in lower grades of civil service employment had higher mortality rates. It was surprising that health outcomes improved with each higher grade of occupation. This shows status isn’t just about money or fancy cars; it’s also about one’s socioeconomic status.

The studies, named after the Whitehall area of London and originally led by Michael Marmot, found a strong association between grade levels of civil servant employment and mortality rates from a range of causes: the lower the grade, the higher the mortality rate. Men in the lowest grade (messengers, doorkeepers, etc.) had a mortality rate three times higher than that of men in the highest grade (administrators). This effect has since been observed in other studies and named the “status syndrome”.[3]

Twenty years later, the Whitehall II study documented a similar gradient in morbidity in women as well as men. — Wikipedia

Storr explains that our craving for status explains the popularity of social media across all countries and cultures.

Will Storr: And that’s the sort of the halting thing when I realized that actually, status is a resource that we need. If we don’t get enough status, we get mentally ill, and we get physically ill, too. So being low status is bad for us physically. And a lot of people have more status in their phones than they do in their actual real life.

They’re going to their ordinary job in their ordinary town, but on this platform, they’re really someone. They’ve got a bunch of followers. That shows you why social media is so powerful. It’s like it’s been globally successful in every culture. Social media is caught on because it’s offering something that humans fundamentally value enormously and need to survive, which is status. It’s a new way of harvesting this incredibly valuable resource that we value more than gold.

In a conversation with Nicola Raihani, a professor of evolution and behavior at University College London, Storr uses the brilliant metaphor of a slot machine to describe social media:

Nicola Raihani: You’ve called social media the slot machine for status. Like, what can you say a bit more about that?

Will Storr: Yeah, I mean, I think the fundamental idea that is behind the status game book is this idea that we all deserve it. Status isn’t just a desire; it’s a need, you know, it’s a fundamental need that we have.

Just like we need to feel belonging and cooperation, but we also need to feel valued by our tribe, especially when you think about it in the terms of those three games: the dominance, virtue, and success that people are constantly manifesting those three behaviors on social media, and sometimes in combination.

And you know, it’s quite well known now that one of the things that can make social media feel really compulsive is that its rewards are inconsistent. So just like a slot machine, you don’t know what’s going to happen next. And I think very often we’re gambling with status.

Like, when we make a contribution to social media, whether it’s a comment about a politician or a picture from our holiday or some pithy quote or whatever it is, it’s our status that we’re gambling with. And you know, the social media company has been very canny about adding to their platforms ways to specifically measure our status.

That metaphor is bang on. Once you’ve gained some followers on social media, the numbers loom large in your mind. Your social media scorecard becomes a status marker that you can brag about. Then things go south, because very few people know how to navigate the fickle fame of social media.

A large following changes the nature of the game people play. When you have a small following, you don’t care much because you have no status. But once you have a following, the possibility of losing it, and, by extension, the status, is front and center in your mind.

The threat of losing status changes people’s behavior so that they act in a way that preserves their status on social media platforms. So they start posting what gets engagement and get into pissing contests. This pursuit of status is one reason for the stupidity you see on social platforms.

Having said all this, I’d be an idiot if I had no self-awareness. Whether I like it or not, whatever little status that comes from writing here feels good.

I loved this part. We went from competing in status games in small groups to everyone in the world, and this is making us more miserable than ever.

Will Storr: But in this day and age, in these huge groups in which we belong to, it’s much harder to feel relative status because you’re competing with millions of people, especially online. And I think that’s a source of a huge amount of misery in the modern world. A stress. I call it identity anxiety. Identity stress. We feel really unsatisfied with the amount of connection and status that we have because we exist in these fucking massive international tribes.

Luxury beliefs

Rob Henderson coined the term “luxury beliefs,” and here’s how he defines it:

Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. Adopting unconventional views is a way to distance oneself from ordinary people for middle-class individuals who didn’t attend universities, don’t keep up with fashionable periodicals, and don’t listen to podcasts and the like.

These luxury beliefs, we can get into specific examples, but my claim is that nowadays, you can predict much more about someone’s social class from their views on a handful of political or social topics than you can just from what they happen to be wearing or carrying with them at that time.

His central thesis is that we no longer live in a world where luxury possessions are the only indicators of status. He’s drawing on the work of the famous economist Thorstein Veblen and his theory of conspicuous consumption.

In sociology and in economics, the term conspicuous consumption describes and explains the consumer practice of buying and using goods of a higher quality, price, or in greater quantity than practical.[1] In 1899, the sociologist Thorstein Veblen coined the term conspicuous consumption to explain the spending of money on and the acquiring of luxury commodities (goods and services) specifically as a public display of economic power—the income and the accumulated wealth—of the buyer. To the conspicuous consumer, the public display of discretionary income is an economic means of either attaining or of maintaining a given social status.[2][3] — Wikipedia

Today, thanks to the falling cost of manufacturing, luxury goods have become far more affordable than they have ever been. So if the less rich and the filthy rich can both have similar goods, then how can the filthy rich signal their affluence? According to Ro, the filthy rich now distinguish themselves based on their beliefs. He gives the example of defund the police movement in the US, which became a slogan in the wake of the murder of a 46-year-old black man by the police.

Rob cites surveys to show the most vocal supporters of the defund movement were rich Americans. These were people were safe and secure in their gated communities and affluent neighborhoods. The data showed that the poorest Americans were more likely to be victims of robbery and assault. Rob says that these affluent people can afford to have these opinions because the cost of having such opinions is low. In other words, the rich are less likely to be robbed.

Conservative economic policies, or trickle-down economic policies, are another form of luxury belief because they benefit the rich:

Affluent Americans hold a disproportionate share of political power in the United States. When they use this power to pursue conservative economic policies that serve their financial interests, it facilitates rising economic inequality. Building off Thorstein Veblen’sTheory of the Leisure Class(1899), I argue that the desire for social status is an important and unrecognized reason why affluent Americans support conservative economic policies that benefit themselves financially and increase inequality. — The Desire for Social Status and Economic Conservatism among Affluent Americans

It reminds me of something Rebecca Solnit wrote recently:

The choices tech titans make in their personal lives – gated communities, private schools, private jets, mega-yachts, private islands – show that a segregated, shrouded life is their ideal. But they profit off technologies which, while encouraging our own social withdrawal, are focused on capturing as much information about us as possible. That is, we are both more isolated and less private than we’ve ever been. I have never to my knowledge seen any of these billionaires, but by necessity I use their platforms and software and move among their employees. I live in a city and to some extent in a world that has been radically reshaped by their urges and ideals, which are not my urges and ideals.

I think this is a fascinating idea and a useful frame for looking at the world. Once you’re aware of luxury beliefs, you start seeing them everywhere. Think about the Indian political landscape and the ongoing policy debates.

Rob’s ideas are similar to those of Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, a professor of public planning at USC and author of The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class. Her work shows that the rich are spending more money on inconspicuous consumption, like showing off their knowledge, cultural capital, and conscientiousness:

While much inconspicuous consumption is extremely expensive, it shows itself through less expensive but equally pronounced signalling – from reading The Economist to buying pasture-raised eggs. Inconspicuous consumption in other words, has become a shorthand through which the new elite signal their cultural capital to one another. In lockstep with the invoice for private preschool comes the knowledge that one should pack the lunchbox with quinoa crackers and organic fruit. One might think these culinary practices are a commonplace example of modern-day motherhood, but one only needs to step outside the upper-middle-class bubbles of the coastal cities of the US to observe very different lunch-bag norms, consisting of processed snacks and practically no fruit.

This has long been known in the world of finance. Larry Swedroe called hedge funds one of the greatest anomalies in finance, given their horrendous performance and usurious fees. I recently met someone who runs a hedge fund and told him that people invest in hedge funds to let other people know they’ve invested in hedge funds. In other words, hedge funds are a status symbol.

That’s it for this post. There are countless rabbit holes to go down, and I hope I’ve given you a good enough map to find yours.

Good reads

We Moderns Are Status-Mad

However, for the first time in history the industrial revolution enabled income/wealth to grow faster than did human population, inducing a rapid increase in average income/wealth, an increase that has been continuing for several centuries now. As a result, our status detection systems have severely misfired. They tell us each that, because we are rich, we have high relative status. And the richer we have become, the more severe has been this error.

The Significance of Status: What It Is and How It Shapes Inequality

Conspicuous consumption is over. It’s all about intangibles now

The psychology of prestige: why we play the social status game

However, when your drive to be outwardly successful supersedes all else, you may ignore exciting vocational work opportunities, put too little energy into personal relationships, or fail to make time for rest. If you decline opportunities for personal growth or self-discovery while striving for status, you could progress fast, but not in the right direction.

In situations in which status, rather than the achievement itself, is the goal, we will find that even when acquired, we will likely remain dissatisfied.

Who Wants to Play the Status Game?

There is a philosophical conundrum at the root of all this: morality requires we maintain a safety net at the bottom that catches everyone—the alternative is simply inhumane—but we also need an aspirational target at the top, so as to inspire us to excellence, creativity and accomplishment. In other words, we need worth to come for free, and we also need it to be acquirable. And no philosopher—not Kant, not Aristotle, not Nietzsche, not I—has yet figured out how to construct a moral theory that allows us to say both of those things.

Why So Many Elites Feel Like Losers

The broader issue here lies in recognizing that the lack of a vision of achievable and replicable success, on the societal level, is dangerous and destabilizing. Due to the rising costs of housing, health care, and education, many of the markers of successful adult American life (most obviously home ownership) have become unattainable for young people. Meanwhile, we’ve spent decades ironizing the trappings of both middle-class respectability and white-collar success, representing the former as boring and conformist and the latter as exploitative and selfish. I don’t have any particular disagreement with those critiques. But the countercultural texts that so viciously lampooned the ordinary definitions of success conspicuously failed to proffer realistic alternatives. The result, from my perspective, is a nation full of young striving types who have no coherent vision of success, no reasonably achievable path forward to avoid feeling like losers. And I think that this is both inhumane for them and unhealthy for society, which requires ordinary people to buy into a shared social contract. Absent a more modest model of success, it’s little wonder that so many have decided to become creators, influencers, or artists. 

In the Shadow of Silicon Valley

The luminous Rebecca Solnit writes with great regret about how Silicon Valley has destroyed the essence of San Francisco, a place that has been her home since 1980. This somber yet evocative piece is sure to unleash a flood of memories about your own home and how it has likely changed for the worse, as does anything that modernity touches.”

The choices tech titans make in their personal lives – gated communities, private schools, private jets, mega-yachts, private islands – show that a segregated, shrouded life is their ideal. But they profit off technologies which, while encouraging our own social withdrawal, are focused on capturing as much information about us as possible. That is, we are both more isolated and less private than we’ve ever been. I have never to my knowledge seen any of these billionaires, but by necessity I use their platforms and software and move among their employees. I live in a city and to some extent in a world that has been radically reshaped by their urges and ideals, which are not my urges and ideals.

This post about hope is the first that comes to mind whenever I think of Rebecca Solnit.

Pair this with Hadden Turner’s wonderful mediation on what it means to be a local citizen and at home.

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