Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Status and Esteem Part 1

Status is a position in a social hierarchy. People want status within their in-groups, particularly with high-status individuals inside their in-groups.
I think esteem comes largely from iterative feedback loops with status*. We learn to value ourselves as we perceive others in our in-group to value us. Over time, this is how we form a concrete sense of esteem. If we build a strong enough esteem foundation, no single instance of rejection or loss of status affects our esteem too greatly.

*Technical note: I think all of the needs have feedback loops. Intellectual success raises self-esteem, status and aesthetic appreciation, which increases our ability to meet physiological needs, which enables us to have further intellectual success, etc... I think esteem comes from iterative success in all need areas.

I think that the modern social value meme presents us with a confusing status landscape. We can be tangentially part of many in-groups yet lack a feeling of communal ties. The market economy means we are interdependent with a faceless and impersonal system, a system based on transactionality instead of personal reciprocity. We often feel an intense fear of rejection or loss of status, yet under the conditions of modernity, most individual instances of rejection or loss of status have little effect on our ability to survive. Modernity has drastically widened those we feel some kinship with, which has done a lot for cultural cohesion, peace and commerce. However, that widening has also increased the number of people we can lose status with. Threats to our status are often vague and impersonal, trapping us in a world of existential threat where we lack control over the things we feel threatened by and the consequences of our actions are unclear.

Perversely, we are the safest we have ever been from the consequences of status loss. Expulsion from our social circle is unlikely to result in literal death. If we lose our friends, lovers or jobs we can find others. However, rather than facing large clear threats from people we know, we face a series of small, confusing threats from people and systems beyond our control. Due to the feedback between esteem and status, these confusing circumstances threaten both our sense of belonging and our self-esteem.

Who knows if I am on the right path following the conversation here but my simplification for myself lands like this so that I can digest it. Social media and the expansion of circles of concern/influence from digital connectivity has subjected us in greater ways to the dangerous modern forces of consumerism, capitalism and status with all aspects of the who/what/where/when in all facets of our lives. Essentially its like being in a trench and social media is a grenade lobbed into the depths with us, essentially we get FUBAR'd in the process. I'm doing my absolute best to not get into that trench but damn it's hard.

Reducing contacts points and input with our many aspects of our modern formed communities, at least in North America would do me a whole lot better. Maybe I'm just a little overwhelmed with the amount of contact points I have self-created in the last few years.

@Stasher: I think social media amplifies the problem (as I think all media does). It exposes us to vastly more people (though I think this issue predates media and modernity) and is engineered against us.

On the other hand, every escalation has a corresponding positive aspect, which is often almost the same as the negative aspect. Social media allows us to be rejected, bullied and ostracized by a much larger group of people, but also allows us vastly more opportunity to find people who are more like us.

For my purposes, I think it greatly increases the ambiguous and often shameful fear we feel about being rejected. It also bombards us with addictive stimulation and exposes us to a carefully curated range of things to mimetically desire.

Status and Esteem Part 2

I think that the status/ esteem feedback loop is being sent into overdrive, causing a lot of the crisis of modernity. However, we still need some status to meet our needs.

Pursuing status has a negative connotation. In "Status and Esteem Part 1" I argue that status and esteem are inexorably linked. By that logic, I also argue that status is very closely related to not only self-esteem but also dignity. In this way I think the various crises of modernity are crises of dignity.

Status plays a large part in determining how resources and power are distributed and how we are treated. It plays a large part in which opportunities are open to us. The lower our status, the lower our access to intellectual interest and aesthetic beauty, the lower our opportunity to express our natural human talents and curiosities. Low status seeps into our self-esteem and perception of our own value. Lower status people are more likely to internalize negative self-images and encounter emotionally threatening and confusing circumstances, which lead to behaviors that reinforce their low status position, making it difficult to break free of their circumstances.

In parts of the world where modernity is newer, the horrors of the modern world are often realized before the rewards. People in these places become cut off from their traditional communities and their subsistence skillset. In rich countries, the crisis of inequality is a crisis of dignity, where low-status individuals internalize low-status beliefs and face a cornucopia of challenges to break the negative esteem/ status feedback cycle.