Everyone needs the company of equals.

It’s inherent in our need for the approval of our peers. For that, you kind of need peers. No matter how hard we strive to gain status, and elevate ourselves, we still need people of equal status with whom to associate. It’s only with equals that we can be ourselves.

But this is a tricky subject, because your peers are also your status competitors. The human need for community comes into conflict with the equally human need for status. The exact same people you consider to be “us” are also the ones who might stab you in the back to get one step up the ladder.

And you might do the same to them, if the circumstances were right.

Thus you get the petty micro-competition of middle-class families. Income wise, everyone in the middle class is roughly equal. At the very least, the differences are not so stark as to be a major social barrier. The lawyer making $80K a year doesn’t feel out of place associating with the professor who makes $50K.

The game, therefore, is played on a very small field, and like they say about academic life, the competition is so fierce precisely because the stakes are so small. In the grand scheme of things, it matters not a whit whether you keep up with those pricks the Joneses. It’s not going to have a big impact on your life. Nothing of substance is actually being gained or lost.

But status competition is hard-wired into every single human being’s DNA. The only thing that changes is the peer group. An academic might well turn up their nose at all that petty one-upmanship the bourgeoisie indulge in because they are not as refined and detached as we of the academic set, who are of course above all that. ^[1]

And yet, they will be sure to say it around people they are trying to impress, and aim it rather pointedly at their chief rival. You know, the one they secretly despise and consider a fraud and a failure. The one they would rather die than see succeed, and whom they badmouth every chance they get. The one they really hope to see fail some day, and when they do fail (as they surely must, being so inferior), it will be clear to all who the better academic (in whatever field) is, and you will consider that justice.

And this extends into other arenas that supposedly don’t worry about that kind of thing as well. Like various people in religious orders (monks, nuns, priests, etc), who might very well eschew the outside trappings of worldly status, but only because that’s what they have to do in order to be a member of a high-status group (the pious, who are always higher status than the laity), and then within that group compete for status based on who is the most favored by the ultimate status-giver, God himself.

So the equality we seek can be tricky to find if we are acutely status-conscious. That’s the main reason why the modern human, who gets many conflicting signals from a free and ‘equal’ society, needs to be told to ignore what other people think of them and just be themselves.

That’s the only way to escape the status game completely. And it resolves the latent conflict between the cultural value of individuality and the status seeking urges we all share. Individuality says we are as good as anyone else, and society reinforces that message in many ways. But “comparing yourself to others” denies that equality, and so, in a sense, one of the most important adaptions to modern life us naked beach apes can make is to turn off our status seeking urges completely.

Well, okay. Mostly.

This is not done by a simple act of will, of course. One does not simply shut down a deep primal instinct that we’ve had since we were swinging from tree to tree. Rather, it is the end product of a long spiritual journey wherein the individual must confront one’s feeling of status inadequacy and resolve them to the point where you can truly believe that no matter what, you are “okay”.

That you are adequate. Sufficient. Good enough. Worthy. A good person. A good citizen. The same feeling has many faces, but they all represent the same thing : self-worth.

In my own case, I might seem like a person who operates outside the usual status environment. Like a lot of nerds, I don’t pay attention to things like clothing or family connections or who has a bigger flatscreen TV or any of that bourgeoisie bullshit. Someone could be totally crushing me on that front and I wouldn’t even notice, let alone care.

But I know better. I know that I, too, simply have a different arena for my status desires. I really want people to think I am brilliant, and I long to be recognized as such. One of the reasons I want to write for TV is that I want to have a way to show off my talents in a way that will actually put them to use. I want people to be amazed by my talent and awed by my intellect and delighted by my witty and warm personality and who go away from encountering me thinking “wow, that was one amazing dude!”.

At the same time, I want to be around people like me. People who get me. People around whom I can feel comfortable because they think like I do on a fundamental level. People with lively intellects and a deep curiosity about life. People who like thinking about things, and even more importantly, like discussing things.

This is the human condition. To always compete and to always need the company of our peers.

Being sentient is so complicated.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.