Escape the Status Game

The most important thing is to recognize the game you're playing

Something critical to understand is there are types of wealth other than money.

These include:

• Friends

• Spouse or romantic partners

• Family

• Physical Health

• Psychological Health

• Financial Health

• Time

To live a fulfilling life, just allocate relatively equal resources to the different wealth buckets. It’s deceptively simple.

As a general life principle, always diversify your bets to hedge against a catastrophic failure in one domain. The colloquialism is “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” because sometimes you unexpectedly drop all the eggs walking from the hen house to the kitchen. There are times to take concentrated risks but not until you appreciate the quality of your judgment.

The crux of wealth management is understanding that the relative value or importance you assign these buckets changes as you age. It changes because your time becomes increasingly scarce.

Time is arguably the most valuable form of wealth because its exchanged for all other types. When you zoom out, it’s the currency of your life.

You exchange your time for money at your job. This is called labor capital.

You decide how much time to direct towards your physical and mental health or your relationships your family.

After having kids you exchange your time to raise a child for your genes to survive another generation. You’ve exchanged time for your genes to take another shot at immortality.

Now invert it. Can you buy more time? You can!

You do it every day when you go to the grocery store instead of digging in the dirt to grow your food. This applies to child care, lawn care, auto repair - most things in the services sector of the economy.

Again, the exchange of your labor capital is just the exchange of money and time.

When born you have zero money but approximately 4160 weeks of time (80 years is about the average human lifespan in 2023). The day of your death you have zero time but lots of money that is now worthless to you. It may be worth something to your heirs but you can’t take it with you. So money and time are inversely related.

As children we feel infinite time abundance. This feeling of abundance can last into adulthood, even when the obligations of everyday life constrain your time further. So if you’re not intentional with how you spend your time, you can quickly lose all of it.

The scarcity of time also enhances all your social, romantic and family relationships. Did you know that 90% of the time you will have spent with your parents happens between ages 0-18?

As a final principle, it’s important to understand the indiscriminate pursuit of one type of wealth always has trade offs.

For example, many people exchange their health and relationships while pursuing a lucrative career only to find they are not happy after gathering tremendous financial wealth. Tradeoffs like these can be the right choice at the right time in your life but always be aware of the cost.

If you’re oblivious to the cost it’s easy to get caught up playing status games the rest of your life. Status games are herd signaling games that we’ve been playing since monkey times.

We evolved as social animals. This evolution has had tremendous benefits to our species and cooperative behavior was a major driver in the development of civilization. But consequently, our brain’s autopilot herd function is jockeying for rank.

People want to herd signal they are smarter, wealthier, more attractive, have a better marriage or more possessions. In modern society your herd is your friends, neighbors, coworkers and family.

In life, status games are unavoidable because they are built into the foundation of society.

Just always know specifically which games you are playing and more importantly, know what success or winning looks like so you can eventually stop.

FYI we signal mostly to allocate reproductive resources and determine herd rank. You can see this behavior in the caste systems still present in emerging market countries or how people in developed countries tend to not marry across financial wealth levels.

Signaling is the system evolution derived to allocate sperm and eggs between large numbers of primates.

Also, remember that in nature, sperm is plentiful and eggs are scarce. This manifests as peak reproductive age males tending to signal more aggressively (i.e. taking larger and stupider risks).

This is why teenagers and young men are killed most commonly by trauma related deaths; they do stupid things trying to outcompete in the reproductive signaling game.

Status games are zero sum games because they require someone to feel inferior for the signaling to be effective. This cultivates unhealthy emotions like envy in others and pride in yourself.

Remember that if your time is finite then you only want to play positive sum games with this precious resource.