Popularity is transient

beware the temptation to social climb

Let’s put aside for a moment all the things we try to get ourselves to care about—honesty, sacrifice, generosity, etc—and imagine that we are single-mindedly obsessed with status. All we care about is getting as many people as possible to think we are as impressive as possible. What do we do?

Here’s the wrong answer: try to climb any kind of social ladder. I see people doing this often. They identify the people who others hold in high regard and try to associate with them. They position themselves in the center of these circles by establishing relationships with the right people and regularly advertising their position to others. All of us do this to some extent, but for some people it seems to be the overriding approach to human interaction. Their primary goal is to look impressive to impressive people.

All of that is the wrong way to go about things—even if the only thing you care about is status—because it is fundamentally limited to your existing social context. Popularity is, ultimately, a local phenomenon, and it takes effort to maintain, and without maintenance it withers into nothingness. It really doesn’t last: I’ve seen people succeed temporarily with this kind of social climbing—e.g. getting to the point of associating with literal billionaires—only to eventually be excluded from those groups because the relationships were devoid of substance.

If you want people’s respect, you have to have something real to offer them. Get really good at a specific skill. Be a genuinely kind person. Learn new things and become more interesting. Work on yourself rather than trying to navigate social ladders. Whatever you gain from that will last longer than having the coolest friends in high school. High school will end, and the social contexts in which you currently exist are bound to disband, while the skills you learn and the character you build will last you a lifetime.

Of course, the hope is that in the course of doing this, you will become a more mature person, you’ll begin to untie whatever knot you had that drove your obsession with status in the first place. Someone said recently that “most people are three secure friendships away from never thinking about status again.” While this is exaggerated, there is an important kernel of truth in it—your desire for status is inversely correlated with the degree of unconditional love you receive in your day-to-day real life. I’ve gone back and forth on the question of “how much to focus on status,” and I think it’s easy to swing between the extremes of “completely disregarding status/comparison and becoming a monk-like recluse” at one end, and at the other end “being totally and unrelentingly consumed by how you appear to others.” I think the right answer is somewhere in between, where you recognize that there are material benefits to impressing people, but you’re also wary of letting it be your overriding motivation for doing things. The real goal is to try to be a good person for its own sake, to pursue your curiosity for its own sake, at which point you’ll be both happy and respected, as you slowly find other people who appreciate you for your genuine personhood.