Hacker News Reader

Comment by bumby | Hacker News Reader

William Storr writes about this. His stance is humans are hard wired for status within their social group. The problem is when all your status eggs in one basket and it disappears, it’s not good for your mental health. He advocates for having your identity spread across many different pursuits and disparate social groups, although he admits he’s not very good at doing that himself.

View on HN

> humans hard wired for status within their social group.

Not always "status". Humans benefit from cooperative behaviour but may have many reasons for joining and adhering or leaving.

Having varied interests means different networks. The important point is to see meaning and value. This is where ostracism and rejection can be most painful.

To put a finer point on it, Storr’s thesis is there are three main domains that humans try to achieve status: dominance, competence, and virtue. Same end goal, but different means to get esteem. Put differently, people ultimately need to feel valued by their tribe.

Thanks for clarifying. There must be more subtlety in the "end goal" of membership.

> people ultimately need to feel valued by their tribe

To the extent that people want to remain in a group ("tribe"), I agree.

But this holds only when people feel that they gain value from the group (or tribe). For some members, the sense of gain may be conspicuous prestige, but for other members it may be a humble gain or an unnoticed (inconspicuous) gain.

The quieter members (in O.P.'s narcissistic terminology, the "NPCs" in his company) may have insights that completely escape the O.P. and other prestige-seekers.

I took 1.5 years off to work on an open source project (also because I was struggling with health issues), and the hardest thing was describing what you're doing to other people. I thought I was "above" social status, that it wouldn't affect me, but it did. I was essentially unemployed, that's how it felt at least. It's so much easier just saying "I do X for a living, I work at company Y". It means some company thinks you're good enough to pay good money for.

Keep it simple, then pivot. Most people don't care that much about what you do unless they're in your same industry (in which case, they'd empathize).

> What do you do?

Write software.

> Oh yeah, for who?

$GitProjectName

> What do they do?

It's a project that <short explanation>.

But enough about me, <pivot to different topic | shift focus to the other person>

Thoughtful approach in theory but, in practice, I've found people can be very intentional about trying to measure your value to the tribe (i.e., it's not only something we measure for ourselves). If the initial answers don't provide enough data, people will very often dig in.

> Oh yeah, for who?

$GitProjectName

> Oh, I'm not familiar. How big is that company?

It's an independent project, I'm just getting it off the ground.

> Do you have any customers?

... and so on.

Yes, it's easiest to change the subject but that also becomes an obvious signal. Repeating this dance a few times is enough to dampen one's sense of self worth.

I don't necessarily think this value-measuring is conscious or necessarily reflective of the person's character. It felt more like it's simply the habitual conversational pattern for a lot of people - we've been trained to quickly assess if someone is "like us" (based on very shallow criteria and heuristics).

There's also a difference between saying you work at $FAMOUSCOMPANY and knowing it's true, it gives you a kind of confidence that you don't have if you say "I'm the CEO of my own startup" or something like that. I think actually "I retired early, working on some of my own projects" might work, but all sorts of problems creep up when money is involved like that, especially with family.

I have a better solution: Just lie. Nobody is going to conduct a deep investigation.

> Oh yeah, for who?

Microsoft.

In what book? Searched but can’t find anything that sounds like this.

My guess is The Status Game by Will Storr.

That’s correct, thanks for clarifying.

Hard to take such general advice seriously from someone who apparently doesn’t practice it. In fact, it seems mistaken to do so.

do as I say not as I do is core of all parenting… :)

if the first person to notice a correlation between alcoholism and cirrhosis was an alcoholic, you'd dismiss what he said out of hand and keep drinking?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com