So much of what drives people to hoard wealth and give other people (and themselves) extra work isn’t wanting to have well-being or happiness in absolute terms, but instead wanting to have more of it than others. 

I imagine there was an evolutionary reason that we grew to be so conscious of our place relative to each other.  But I wonder if we’re stuck thinking in these terms, and if perhaps now that mindset has outgrown its use.   There are many primal impulses that are no longer a driving force in our society, and perhaps status-seeking should be next.

Even some workaholics (myself included) disdain people mainly driven by external recognition.   This is a huge theme in The Wire (one of my favorite shows and a horrible celebration of workaholism), made explicit when Lt. Daniels asks Carver: “Is it about you, or about the work?”  I love that line.  However, status-obsession also comes in the form of wanting to “be about the work,” more than others.  Subtler and “nobler,” maybe, but still status-obsession.

It seems like a lot of religious traditions deal with status-seeking as a basic problem of happiness—seeing the universe in separate/comparative terms as opposed to as an interconnected system. I guess that puts us in good company as we consider another guiding question for these dispatches: what is status?  Are we, as humans, condemned to be obsessed by some form of it?   

Or can we break away?  Because if we could, it’d be a lot less work.