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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.