Choose your status game wisely
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Choose your status game wisely
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Re: Choose your status game wisely
#2I always wonder why folks with 9-figure net worth (or high 8) keep doing any job at all.
People do not get very many quality-adjusted life years -- why would you spend 8+ hours per day doing CEO work when you could spend that time with family and friends?
Re: Choose your status game wisely
#3> I know some of you will say “Just ignore the status game altogether,” but this is easier said than done. Like many other animals, we are biologically wired to respond to status. Ignorance is not the way out.
It's not ignorance to overcome our biology. It is possible to control our desire for status and to live better lives and be happier as a result.
Also different cultures are much more competitive about status: America is pretty extreme in this respect.
Re: Choose your status game wisely
#4You should do what makes you feel fulfilled in life. If that thing is status, I question your motivation. People like that are conceited.
Re: Choose your status game wisely
#5I always wonder why folks with 9-figure net worth (or high 8) keep doing any job at all. People do not get very many quality-adjusted life years -- why would you spend 8+ hours per day doing CEO work when you could spend that time with family and friends?
What if they prefer work to family and friends?
A lot of people seem to prefer contributing to wikipedia or writing free software to partying, so it doesn't seem far fetched.
Re: Choose your status game wisely
#6I always wonder why folks with 9-figure net worth (or high 8) keep doing any job at all. People do not get very many quality-adjusted life years -- why would you spend 8+ hours per day doing CEO work when you could spend that time with family and friends?
I'm guessing because not many family and friends would have the same net-worth to have the spare time time to hang out all day. I think of Notch as an example, I'm pretty sure he got quite lonely once he got paid out for Minecraft.
Re: Choose your status game wisely
#7> instability is hell for high status individuals
I feel like this explains a lot about how power structures fight so hard to stay in power--they're biologically wired to suffer more when they lose out than those at the bottom.
This is both something "everyone knows" and refreshing to finally see put in print.
Re: Choose your status game wisely
#8There's some wisdom in this post but it kinda sidesteps for me one of the biggest problems I see with status seeking, which is at some point it seems to -- or at least can -- increasingly involve randomness, corruption, or increasingly unsubstantiable goals. It's like a variant of Goodhart's Law or Campbell's law, but involving randomness and invalidity in addition to corruption, and where those laws also become more important the further you go up the metric dimension.
Even putting aside the issues of value, in the sense of "should I value status in this area", there's this other issue: if you have a metric that's, say, correlated .2 or .3 with some underlying attribute, then almost by statistical definition as you start splitting hairs more and more you're splitting up more and more noise. As you chase status further and further, you're dealing with that more and more.
Maybe this is the same thing as his analogy about instability in hierarchies at some level. But if so I'm not sure the implications are followed as far as they could be.
Re: Choose your status game wisely
#9I always wonder why folks with 9-figure net worth (or high 8) keep doing any job at all. People do not get very many quality-adjusted life years -- why would you spend 8+ hours per day doing CEO work when you could spend that time with family and friends?
The article offers some potential explanations. As they achieve more status their peer group changes and they desire more status relative to their new group. They are looking for that huge exit or massive success.
Alternatively you just don't see the people who retire and spend time with family and friends. They don't post here, they don't have blogs, they don't have articles posted about them. They are just living life.
Re: Choose your status game wisely
#10I always wonder why folks with 9-figure net worth (or high 8) keep doing any job at all. People do not get very many quality-adjusted life years -- why would you spend 8+ hours per day doing CEO work when you could spend that time with family and friends?
Work can be really enjoyable if you have more power to control how your time is spent. No one has complete control of how their time is spent, but that is true of life. If you aren't working you are still going to need to structure your time around activities like hobbies. At this point in my life work is one of my favorite hobbies.