I used 100% of their time as deliberate hyperbole to forestall the exact false arguments that are being made here.
People refuse to accept how thoroughly status goals pervade our lives. You all are doing it here and now. Status is normally perceived as a pejorative, I admit. Few are willing to come out and say bluntly that they are seeking status. That’s why I repeatedly emphasized that status is often unconscious and subsumed in other goals. Nor does status seeking go away with age. Older people seek to maintain their perceived status. When I mentioned just a handful of ways they do that people leapt to insist that they won’t think that way. You will. You will make choices that will reinforce and continue your perceived status. Retirement is in fact a major cause of status threat. All those people whose work was their lives now face the lack of the internal status pleasures it gave them. Reachieving a satisfactory status becomes far more important after retirement than before for many.
Status seeking is even more difficult a subject for people to recognize inside themselves than I thought, and I tried to use extravagant language to force people to examine what status meant, how varied and diffuse it is, how pervasive it is, and why it is - like most things - neither an absolute positive nor an absolute negative.
Esteem needs are the fourth level in Maslow’s hierarchy and include self-worth, accomplishement [sic] and respect. Maslow classified esteem needs into two categories: (i) esteem for oneself (dignity, achievement, mastery, independence) and (ii) the desire for reputation or respect from others (e.g., status, prestige).
Maslow does put the need for respect as highest in adolescence, as others here have claimed. But that needs to be read as the precursor to the tip of the pyramid, self-actualization, which comes with age and wisdom and can be threatened by outside circumstances.
Maslow’s pyramid is merely the simplified beginning of understanding, not an end. He and others have expanded it, and many have criticized it. I reference it only to reinforce the point that status, his esteem, is a basic need of humanity. You need it, and you, and you, and you. And me.
Which appears to me to be a way of saying that no amount of reports, or of other evidence, from any number of people that status is not most of the time a significant motivator for everyone will be accepted; because evidence that other goals are the motivation for decisions will be considered as “status subsumed in other goals” and reports that status was not a motive will be considered as “you don’t think it was, but it actually was your motive, you’re just not conscious of it.”
What, if anything, would you accept as falsifying your claim?
And while we’re at it, are you talking about competitive status, as in being more respected than other people? Or are you talking about being accepted by a group, including by a very small group, without ranking being involved?
As far as I can tell, you made a false statement, which prompted truthful arguments in response.
And if someone replies that people refuse to accept that, no, it’s not as thoroughly pervasive as you say, and you’re the one getting it wrong here and now — what? If I can’t believe both of you, then why the heck would I default to believing the guy who (a) put out a false statement on this very topic and (b) promptly got met with truthful arguments?
If there is one thing that the social sciences have conclusively proven, it’s that people lie to themselves all the time and/or are unaware of why they do many of the things they do.
I’ve already listed a half dozen broad subjects as examples of stuff that people deny apply to them but everybody knows - or should know - really affect them in times and places and ways they don’t realize.
Do you truly believe that you are above the forces of societal interaction in every phase of your daily life? Do you not eat food, or live in a house, or work for a living, or seek love or acceptance or companionship? Are you an alien outside humanity?
I’m going to guess the answer to all those are no. You’ve spent you’re entire life making choices that comprise the totality of who you are today. Those choices reflect your conception of the status role you prefer. Or call it esteem or prestige or respect or personal identity if the term status bothers you. If you are human you are seeking or maintaining your status at every opportunity.
Deny your humanity if you feel you must. Deny my pointing out utterly basic truths about humans. I’m used to it. Social sciences are a low-status branch of academics.
Well, that sure failed. By the way: using gasoline to prevent kitchen fires also doesn’t work.
You’re undermining your own argument, in my opinion. I see no one here claiming that status isn’t pervasive. Only that it is possible to spend little to no time in acquiring more.
That’s because, as I’m sure you agree with agree with, for some of us the acquisition of status is easier than for others. For me, it’s an almost completely passive activity–partly because I’m a white male, partly because of being middle age, partly because I’m good at my job.
Marginalized groups have to work harder to approach the same level. I remember being a kid and having no status. It sucked.
It’s exactly the fact that some have to work harder than others for status that illustrates the differences between marginalized vs. privileged groups.
As an aside, I probably spend more time undermining my own status than I do in acquiring more. I’m a senior dev that works with junior devs. I can notice a certain hesitation in them when discussing an approach to a problem. So I intentionally downplay my experience, pull my punches a bit in arguing, and so on, because I want their input. I also don’t want to be an undue influence–gentle encouragement, not telling them what to think.
My point is: if I’d told you what I’d majored in, your argument seems to be that I would’ve done so as, well, A Status Thing; and that me having done the opposite is, presumably, what you’d label A Status Thing — and if I wind up posting it later in this thread, you can say that waiting before mentioning it then is A Status Thing; and if I wind up not posting it in this thread, you can of course point and laugh and say that my refusal to answer is A Status Thing.
If that’s so, then the ability to explain everything explains nothing — and if it’s not so, then feel free to explain what hypothetical response wouldn’t count as evidence for your position.
So you’re saying that status differences are extremely important and that you are very aware of them and modify your behavior accordingly. And that somehow refutes my argument that status is involved in all human interactions.
Of course some people inherently have more status because of the accidents of birth. Of course people who have less status can either strive for more or become increasingly marginalized and disaffected. The sum effect of the accidents of birth contribute to the ways that status seeking proceeds over the course of a lifetime. That’s why I call it totally pervasive in everything you do. Status is definitionally part of the social aspect of human relationships. It cannot be avoided or canceled out. “I don’t do status” is not a meaningful statement.
At no point have I argued that status isn’t pervasive. It’s pervasive in the animal kingdom as well, so it’s not like it’s something humans invented.
What I’m arguing is that the “quest” for status is not pervasive, at least not universally. I’m not nitpicking your “100%” here; I’m saying that it is sometimes close to 0% for the privileged. Because status accrues automatically, whether we like it or not. Sometimes it’s actually a problem, such as if you have a set of friends that you like but with diverging status (a reason for not sharing salaries, for instance).
“I don’t do status” is not a thing, but “I don’t actively seek out status” very much is.
Nonsense. They’re not stuck with that pair of unpleasant options (unpleasant particularly because by definition if people have less and more status there must always be people, in fact most people, with “less status”; so striving for more is in many cases going to be unsuccessful.) Many people know a small group of people among whom they’re accepted, and among whom they don’t need to continually strive for status; and they can not worry about those who think that others must either be continuously frantically striving for their favorable attention or must “become increasingly marginalized and disaffected”.
Yes, just about everybody human needs to be accepted by some group of other humans. No, it is not a universal human need to have or attempt to have high “status” in the eyes of people in general; especially when the lack of it doesn’t endanger or even seriously inconvenience them. Neither is it universal that group acceptance requires some form of continuous competitive status-seeking.
I find it odd that you appear to be using competitive status as a synonym for social acceptance. They don’t seem at all the same thing to me.
And I would still like an answer to my question as to what, if anything, you’d accept as falsification.
A direction I was hoping this thread would take relates to how lack of opportunity for earned status affects society, especially minorities and other marginalized groups. I am not referring to unreasonable expectations of status such as you might commonly see with narcissists, but more just a general sense of wellbeing derived from being valued in different aspects of our lives. A lot of bad behaviors in rich, poor, males, females etc. can be traced back to a need for status and conversely a lot of very good positive behaviors can be traced back to those who have been able to achieve some status in meaningful ways. I feel the human need for status is grossly underrated and a driver in society. What are things we can do as a society to enhance a framework rich in opportunities for people to achieve a better sense of self worth?
I see them more as tiers than gradations. People more or less compete within their tiers, and within the accepted status symbols, etc… that their tier values. What one tier values, may be seen as cheap/tawdry/trashy by another.
That’s why some people couldn’t care less about expensive designer sneakers, while another group may not care about the car you drive- to them, it’s about where in Europe you vacation.
Teach people not to assign their self worth to things that are essentially controlled by others. That’s a start.
I’m reminded of when that sort of dawned on me for the first time. I was in middle school, and the clique of girls/boys who were basically the arbiters of what was cool and what wasn’t tended to decide these things relatively capriciously. They were always things they could manage themselves, but the trick was more that they’d change it up so that if you weren’t in the “IN” crowd, you were never actually “cool”, as what was “cool” had changed out from under you.
I realized that this was all bullshit, and that I just wasn’t interested in playing that game.
I don’t think it’s teirs, more cultures. Like, I’m at a STEM magnet school. One noticable thing here is that it is much more difficult to pick out kids “of privilege” than at my old comprehensive high school. The economic diversity is really pretty much the same range, but at the first school, the culture was much more about your socioeconomic class, so class markers were subtle but very much there. Where I am now, your math track matters more than your money, and those markers aren’t nearly as common. If anything, the culture is to downplay those things because they are seen as pretentious.
Every once in a while we get a kid who doesn’t grok this and it’s pretty funny, in a cringe way. Interestingly, that dynamic plays out among the faculty, as well. So it is even more cringy when we get a faculty member who doesn’t understand.
Maybe so… I was thinking of it along the lines of among white people in Texas, there are different status symbols that more or less correspond to your socio-economic class.
But cultures make sense too; I recall in college that what gave you status in the sci-fi/gaming culture was not the same thing as what would give you status in say… the ag student culture, even if everyone was broadly the same socioeconomically.