Zat Rana
Here
is an interesting fact: People who are lower down on the socioeconomic
status ladder (as measured by income, occupation, living conditions,
etc.) are less healthy than those higher up. At first glance, this may
make sense because we can easily assume that those with resources have
access to better healthcare, but there’s more to it than that.
In his tome of a book on human behavior, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst,
Stanford University neuro-endocrinologist Robert Sapolsky argues that a
good portion of the difference is caused by stress. In particular, it
is the stress associated with our own awareness of where we sit on this
socioeconomic ladder. Objective factors play a role, of course, but when
people in research studies were asked to judge their own status
relative to others, it became clear that there is a particular kind of
stress associated with simply knowing that there are people who are
higher up in society than you and that you live your life in response to
this fact. This, in turn, leaves you susceptible to more health
problems.
As
wild as the subjectivity of this is, in some ways, it’s perhaps no
surprise. Humans are masters of creating and working status hierarchies.
For as long as we have existed in groups, we have competed with each
other for resources, and that competition has generally created a clear
pecking order. Historically, those at the top gained all kinds of
rewards that people lower down didn’t, like access to mating
opportunities, food and shelter, and other nice-to-haves. Even today,
people who are wealthier or have some other form of reputational
currency are given things that most others aren’t, and so, it makes
sense that it’s something we keep track of.
In
fact, we keep track of it to such a degree that it’s useful to think of
ourselves as having two separate selves: the first is our first-person
self — who we say we are, what we like, the version of us that makes us
different from other people — and our third-person self — who we think
other people think we are, what we want other people to think we like,
the version of us that watches how others judge us and where that
judgment places us in the status hierarchy. And this latter self is
incredibly useful because, as a human being, to live in the physical
world is to live in the social world, and if you don’t have the social
intelligence to judge what others think of you and how your interactions
with them play out, then your ability to live well suffers.
In
the past, especially, this third-person self had a critical role to
play. In hunter and gatherer tribes, for example, the difference between
being at the top of the ladder versus the bottom could have been the
difference between life and death. To add to that, if other people
thought too badly of you, you could be rejected from the tribe, and that
was indeed as good as death. In harsh living conditions, individuals
don’t survive; groups do.
In
our modern, interconnected world, two things have happened: The first
is that we are globally connected, which means that the hierarchy is far
more extreme. It’s no longer a competition within a group of, say, 150
people, but it’s competition observed across 7 billion people, and we
all know who Bill Gates is or who Jeff Bezos is; the second is that
because the world we live in today is far more abundant (at least in
Western countries, where the majority of us don’t worry about food and
shelter), and our local groups measure status by different markers (who
dresses the best at school, who sings the best at church, who knows the
most bouncers at the city bars, etc.), we don’t just have one place in
one hierarchy but many places in many hierarchies, and this changes
quite literally in every single interaction we have relative to who is
there and what the context is.
Not
only is the modern, third-person self judging itself relative to people
it doesn’t know and people who will never have any impact on its life,
but it is constantly re-calibrating its perception according to markers
across the tens and hundreds of different little groups that it is a
part of. From this point of view, it’s perhaps no surprising that this
whole game is capable of causing so much subjective stress that people
end up being exposed to diseases that they otherwise would be completely
free from. The question, of course, is what we do about this.
The
answer is relatively simple: Close the gap between the first and the
third-person self by calibrating your principles and living by them and
them only. Some 200,000 years ago, your rank in the group was directly
tied to your livelihood. Today, the world is far too complex for that to
be the case. Sure, knowing that Bill Gates has more money than you is
rubbed into your face regularly, but what does that have to do with your
life? Do you not have enough self-respect to realize that he had a
different life, with different values, and different goals that catered
to his own individuality and that you can’t compete with that regardless
of net worth? Once basic income, food, and
shelter are taken care of, in the modern world, most of us don’t have
any obligation to play the status game, and doing so is a direct attack
on our own individuality because it rejects our own uniqueness and
accepts that there are enough people just like us for us to directly
compete with.
In
every single interaction we have, status is at play. Most of the time,
this is unconscious and expressed in our body language relative to a
person or a group. You can even think that you don’t care about it, but
if you haven’t truly outlined your own values and principles to reflect
your own unique individuality, and if you haven’t gotten over the
irrational fear of rejection, then you are likely still accumulating
stress from social anxiety by simply being around people who you
perceive to be better or worse than you.
Status
independence means that you are the same person at work as you are at
home as you are in a local bar as you are in a different country. It
means that outside of situations where it directly affects your
livelihood (perhaps work-related), there are no people who are better or
worse than you, only different. And because we’re all different, most
judgments don’t matter. And when judgments don’t matter, social context
doesn’t matter, which means that social anxiety and social stress are
mitigated. And the thing about this is that, with this level of
integrity, you begin to go into every situation with absolutely nothing
to prove, nothing to show, nothing to gain. And because everybody else
is always trying to prove something, it’s always impressive to people to
see someone with the restraint not to do the same.
You
can’t always be the richest or the prettiest, but you can be the person
who is least impressed by these things alone; the person who looks
beyond status to see character both in yourself and in other people.
Social anxiety and psycho-social stress are generally signs, that deep
down, you care about the wrong things. It means that you haven’t done
the work required to feel comfortable with who you are and where you are
going so you have to settle for the shortcut-way of measuring worth.
Not always, because it’s obviously a lot more complex than that and some
people do struggle with crippling versions of anxiety and stress that
go beyond this, but for most people, this is true.
The
most insidious thing, of course, is that even in the modern world,
playing status games can be necessary as a means to our personal goals.
The redeeming thing, on the other hand, is that when you are status
independent — a truly agnostic state where you neither love nor hate
status but just see it as it is — you do actually end up attracting
status.
In
any social situation — from a high-end business negotiation, to a date,
to interactions with friends, even — the unspoken rule is that the
person who is the most relaxed (not superficially relaxed, but truly,
internally calm), is the person who earns the most attention over time.
People can intuitively sense it. Why is that? Because in order to be
that calm, to be that relaxed, it must be true that they have absolutely
nothing to hide, no vulnerability they are covering up for, no
aggression/strong-front to hide deeper insecurities, which immediately
establishes trust. You might not always notice this person right away,
but when you do, you can’t help but gravitate towards them.
Your
relationship with other people can either generate or destroy your
livelihood, and a big part of the difference lies in a simple
distinction: Do you judge yourself and others by status or by character?
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