I’ve gotten into a nasty little habit. I’ll wake up, roll over to where my laptop is next to me (yes, I sleep next to my laptop, I don’t want to talk about it), and immediately flood my eyes with blue light as I check my social media channels.
I started doing social media about a year and a half ago, as a way to find new audiences for my newsletter. Prior to that, I had no social media at all. And in the time since, creating content grew from something I did haphazardly on the side into the way I make a living. I internally shirk against the idea of a personal brand — I’ve written about how optimization culture is making us all miserable — and yet here I am. Posting. Tracking. Monitoring growth. Feeling like my legitimacy hinged on the numbers continuing to go up.1
I spent most of my twenties asking the question Sheila Heti wrote an entire novel about: How should a person be? There is no playbook. And yet we cling to these ideas of status — these proxies for worth — because the alternative is sitting with the question of whether any of this matters at all.
Status has always been a thing, of course. But we now live inside systems that price status, track it, and sell it back to us in real time. And like the broader economy, it’s become more precarious and more fractured than ever.
The local ladder and the global leaderboard
Status, at its core, is a ranking. It’s your position in the invisible pecking order that exists in every group humans form — from a corporate boardroom to a middle school cafeteria. It attempts to answer the question everyone is constantly trying to figure out: how much does this person matter here?
The desire for status is a fundamental human motive. It’s up there with belonging and safety. As you can see:
Your brain is running status calculations all the time — looking for who is capitulating to whom, who commands attention, who has the nicest stuff, who seems confident, who people want to be around, etc, etc. This is un-installable software in your brain.
Every time you feel a pang of envy scrolling through someone’s engagement photos, every time you adjust how you describe your job depending on who’s asking, every time you feel a flush of pride when someone important remembers your name — that’s the program running.
“But I don’t care about status!!!” Yes you do. You just might not realize it. You can intellectually reject status games all you want — your brain is unconsciously still playing them.
The important thing is that status is completely relative. It’s not calculated against some universal benchmark. It’s calculated against whoever else is in the room. A surgeon has high status in a hospital but not necessarily at a skatepark. Which is why status is so deeply entangled with money. Money is the most legible, most portable status signal we have. Every financial decision you make is shaped, consciously or not, by where you think you stand relative to the people around you.
There are two fundamentally different kinds of status. The first is the respect and admiration you get from people who actually know you — your friends, your coworkers, your community. Your standing on the local ladder. It’s earned through relationships, rooted in a specific place and a specific group of people. And it’s the kind that actually predicts whether you’re happy. When your local standing goes up, your well-being goes up. When it drops, it drops. The effect is stronger than income, education, or job. Having money only really feels good insofar as it makes the people around you respect you more.
The second is what most people mean when they say “status” — wealth, income, job title, clothes, etc. The stuff people can more readily see (and quantify). It’s much easier to compare your salary to someone else than it is to determine if you’re a better partner/friend/daughter.
This kind of status barely moves the needle when it comes to happiness. People adapt to new income levels almost immediately (hello, hedonic adaptation). You get the raise, you feel good for a month, your reference group shifts, and you need more.
For most of human history, the first kind dominated. Your reputation was very much local. It was earned through relationships and built over a long period of time. It was stable once built and pretty hard to fake. You either showed up for your community or you didn’t.
A couple of things blew this up.
The fracturing of status
The digital age collapsed your reference group. For most of human history, you compared yourself to a few dozen people you actually knew. Now you compare yourself to thousands (hell, millions) constantly, through a screen that’s algorithmically optimized to make you feel bad about yourself (aspiration is the engine of consumer culture, as I’ve said!). Follower counts, likes, engagement metrics, subscriber numbers — suddenly there were new ways to measure where you stood, and new ways to feel like you were falling behind. Your local ladder got replaced by an infinite one where you can never see the top.
Our economy made everything precarious. When the traditional markers of stability (say, homeownership) started slipping out of reach, people made up for it by investing in the signals of stability instead. You can’t afford the house but you can afford the wardrobe that suggests you could. Plus, our current K-shaped economy is making everyone extremely anxious — economic precarity breeds status spending. You want to feel in control of your situation, so you spend to make yourself feel better.
Economic capital is money. Cultural capital is taste, knowledge, credentials — the stuff that tells people you belong in the room. Social capital is your network. And status is what happens when all three compound. What’s changed is that the infrastructure for this conversion has been explicitly digitized and accelerated. Ways to communicate status have become increasingly tradable, depreciable, and constantly repriced.
The result: status has become an asset class.
You can build it — personal brand, audience, credentials, visibility. You can invest in it — wardrobe, education, experiences. You can leverage it — convert followers into income, reputation into deal flow, visibility into opportunity. And you can lose it in a crash — a public misstep, a layoff from a prestigious company, an algorithm change that tanks your reach.
Status has its own version of volatility, liquidity, and ROI. Influencers, for example, understand this intuitively. So does anyone who has ever spent money they didn’t have on something they didn’t need in order to maintain a position they weren’t sure they occupied.2
The asset that never holds its value
Status is precarious by design. Because if it were stable, nobody could sell you the next thing.
When status was primarily about physical stuff — the car, the house, the watch — you could buy it and hold it. It might depreciate, but at least the signal was tangible and relatively stable. Now that status is about knowledge, taste, affiliations, social media followers, cultural fluency, etc, the whole thing has become radically unstable. What is cool when the definition of cool is shifting by the hour?
In order to maintain your status, then, you literally have to stay in the know, all the time. It’s the same logic as day trading: you can never close your position, the market never sleeps, and falling behind for even a day can cost you.
And just like our get-rich-quick culture — the crypto bets, the meme stocks, the prediction markets — you see the same desperation in status. People want the shortcut. The hack. The thing that will vault them to the top of a hierarchy. This reinforces the speed in which status is constantly changing.
When status becomes an asset class, your financial behavior stops being purely about money. It becomes about maintaining and projecting your position. That’s when you start seeing people optimize for looking successful rather than being successful — which contributes to our current culture of rampant, mass consumerism.
This is the engine beneath a lot of consumer debt. It’s a mirror of the K-shaped economy — the top pulls further away, the middle hollows out, and both groups spend to signal something they feel slipping (as I’ve written about before, positional precarity). Their anxiety drives the spending, which drives the industry, which manufactures more anxiety. And so it goes.
The dashboard and the void
When you stake your self-worth on outcomes you can’t fully control, your self-concept becomes volatile. And because status is now so fractured, you’re not managing one self-concept. You’re managing dozens. The version of you on Instagram. The version at work. The version your friends know. The version strangers infer from your apartment, your clothes, your taste.
Each one requires maintenance and can be undermined by a change in the winds. Researchers have started calling this identity fatigue — the exhaustion that comes from constantly performing a curated self. A 2025 meta-analysis found consistent links between higher social media engagement and lower self-evaluation, increased anxiety, and depressive symptoms.
This helps explain brain rot culture or people online that seem to have no other identity outside of media consumption or buying things. When your self-concept is organized around a rotating portfolio of external metrics, you lose the thread of who you truly are. You become a bundle of signals with nothing underneath, in part because the system rewards being a bundle of signals and punishes having a stable, quiet, un-optimized self.
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The kind of status that actually makes people happy — being respected and known by the people in your face-to-face life — is the exact kind that gets crowded out when you’re busy managing the other kind.
Alain de Botton wrote that the pursuit of status has less to do with material comfort than with love — that what we’re really chasing when we chase rank is the assurance that we matter to someone. That we won’t be abandoned. That we’re worthy of attention and care. Which makes the whole status economy feel even crueler, because the version of status our current system sells — the one made of metrics and money and things that scale digitally — is the one least likely to deliver the thing we actually want.
The whole system runs on a kind of collective amnesia about what actually matters. We build the metrics. We optimize for the metrics. We forget why we built the metrics. We assume the metrics are the thing instead of a proxy for the thing. And then we wonder why we feel empty.
The crux of what I do is inherently creative — that’s why we call ourselves creators — and yet the creative process has become weirdly hard because I feel a constant pull to optimize for the algorithm instead of the writing. The thing about being a “creator” in 2026 is that you’re simultaneously an artist, a brand strategist, a data analyst, and a marketer, and the last three are always trying to eat the first one alive.
This has always been part of status, because our current fast-paced digital world has completely fractured and scrambled what status means in daily life. It’s like moving your entire portfolio from a broad-market index fund to a memecoin.
you matter, Hanna!
As always, very insightful. Thank you 🙏