The minute you walk into an elevator, everybody is immediately sizing up each other to figure out who is high and low status. When you're driving down the road, you can't help but think that someone's trying to “out status” you by accelerating past you or cutting you off. Status is everywhere, even if we're not conscious of it.

Will Storr is an author, and former photographer and journalist. His books include, “The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It: On Social Position and How We Use it,” “Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us,” and the novel “The Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone: The Secret Ingredient of Unforgettable Food Is Suffering.”

He and Greg chat in this episode about all of the things we humans use to rate each other's status, including humiliation, the exploitation of status on social media, the cult of Crossfit, and the problem with relentlessly encouraging high self esteem in our children.

Episode Quotes:

Status is a psychological nutrient for our bodies

9:36: One of the ways I think about status is it's a social nutrient. It’s like an essential nutrient that we need, but it's a psychological nutrient rather than one for our bodies. And, when we don't get that nutrient, we begin to suffer very badly.

Humiliation drives people to be cruel

10:46: Humiliation is a sudden and painful public loss of status that drives people to cruel and evil acts. And it even affects us physically.

Social media as a status generating machine

19:20: Social media has become universally so huge all over the world because it's a status-generating machine. Billions of people who live otherwise kind of relatively ordinary lives can go on social media, and they can earn status. They can show off their possessions or their political beliefs, attack other people, and play these status games. Social media has created all this status where there wasn't any kind of status beforehand.

Morality is an aspect of our shared imagination

50:05: You can't see morality under a microscope. It's not a scientific thing that exists in the world in a material way. We all decide it's the rules of our game. So what happens is that we have our own moral laws and our moral symbolic beliefs. But when another group has a different set of moral beliefs, we take that as an attack on our sense of status, like our beliefs are often our criteria for claiming status.

Guest Profile:

His Work:

194. Status and The Games We Play feat. Will Storr

unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc