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Comment by tsunamifury | Hacker News Reader

I think rejecting status wholesale is also a huge mistake.

Here’s the harsh reality. Many people judge and make decisions based on status. You can purport be above it and bootstrap and work as hard as you want but that one guy with status will get the raise he needed and now you don’t have. You can then try to lie to yourself that that is just superficial status. But it’s not. That guy can now use those resources to get ahead and you can’t.

Bootstrapping can become a toxic independence mentality that focuses on lying to yourself on how self sufficient you are — all while you are going nowhere fast.

Reality is harsh and doesn’t go by pat philosophies.

Also go ask a low status person in society how much status “doesn’t matter” and you’re gonna get some very real answers. Mostly I find people who already have high status are the ones that rant about how it doesn’t matter.

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I've had high status and low status experiences. In my 30's I was worth a couple million as a software developer. In my 50's I was broke, homeless and rejected by everyone. I'd say there are pros and cons of both experiences, but I don't think it's worth going into them because I think both experiences are different for everyone.

Now that I'm recovered, I should mention status seeking is also a well known problem in the spiritual community. You've probably noticed people who have a big ego about being "awakened and enlightened"

Come on there are very few pros to being broke and homeless.

Like many things I think status is something that is good to have, but obessing over it doesn't help. The difference between having no status and any status is huge, but the more you get the more diminishing returns there are.

The article is really about chasing status as a goal, rather than as a means to an end. Open ended goals are good for giving continuous purpose, but staking your identity on achieving something that is ultimately unachievable is bad for your mental health.

It seems obvious to me that focusing on doing the right thing is good, while focusing more on managing everyone else’s impression of you is bad. In fact I thought everyone knew this.

A lot of really bad people didn’t care at all what anyone else thought of them.

Status, like it or not, is a huge determining factor in opportunities. You can do the right thing all you want but if people think nothing of you, you might not get very far.

This is coming from someone who doggedly believes in doing the right thing and lost status many times for doing what I thought was right. It doesn’t always work out.

Managing everyone's impression of you is how I understand you're supposed to make friends. If you don't fit in with a group then they'll stop wanting to be around you and you'll no longer have them to talk to. Arguably having a single friend is similar to the idea of being part of an exclusive club without the pointless vanity; on the contrary it's a critically important factor for not going insane from isolation. The tradeoff for receiving that benefit is you have to acknowledge their wants and needs instead of always acting in your own interest, and coexist with them peacefully.

Gotta do both if you want to retain the right to do the correct things in the future.

If you're generally doing good things, you don't need to spend anywhere near as much time managing your public reputation. Obviously you can choose to, but it'd be by choice and not out of desperate attempts to glorify meagre deeds or cover-up bad ones.

So, I had a somewhat similar reaction and have made the same argument you are making in your last couple of sentences. It's frustrating to me when I see some of the dismissive sorts of comments as the article makes, because as you say it's often made by individuals who have it, and don't appreciate what happens when it's not there. I've even gone so far as to say it's insulting to the less well-off to dismiss it as a concern, because it does nothing to change things for the better.

Along these lines, in many systems or subcommunities, many of these status markers reflect something inherently broken about the system, often at a very deep or fundamental level. So do you just ignore this and climb up them? Sometimes, for whatever reason, you can change things, but other times it becomes impossible to do so, and you're left with the choice of playing the game and winning, or just exiting altogether and trying a different game somewhere else.

Sometimes that exiting comes across as sour grapes revisionism, but sometimes it's very real. It can be frustrating to know that your odds of achieving success are dependent on doing something immoral, corrupt, or, at best meaningless, or to know that it involves a huge amount of pure luck or systemic pathology that is never acknowledged. Sometimes you can just go with the flow, but if doing so starts to have notable costs in itself, it poses significant problems.

Yes. There are a lot of, lets say "humble statuses" out there.

For example "has 2 years of dev experience" is a status.

So you can aim for this status, then change jobs to get

"paid over X a year" status.

This status then is seen by the mortgage company.

Then there is the TEDx talk, 10000 start github repo, well know youtuber etc.

These can be carefully crafted stepping stones.

Status as an intermediate goal can be a good thing to use.

Status as FOMO is probably not.

It’s okay to use status as a tool in a wealth creation game. Encouraged even! It’s called leverage in that case.

It’s ill-advised to chase status as a goal in itself.

Yes, I'm about to say it's not a trap. It's a jail! Trying to avoid status makes your life quality worse, more restrict ways of doing things. It's narrower in all directions. It is a jail.

I've actually read the article and it read to me that the author is suggesting against obsessing over status, and not avoiding it.

And it seems to me there's a lot of middle ground between those two things.

Rejecting status wholesale is the greatest form of status.

I think this comment misses the point of the article.

The article doesn't say you shouldn't work on projecting status for specific outcomes. If you want to raise money from venture capitalists, you should try to present yourself in a way that venture capitalists perceive as worthy of investment. If you think that VCs invest based on Ted talks or viral tweets, then do that.

There's a world of difference between executing a social media strategy to support your fund raising efforts and desperately trying to appear high status on Twitter to soothe your feelings of inadequacy.

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