Indeed people often play low status, small, energy preserving lying down curling up, frowny crying—in order to signal other people for reassurance. This gets trained out of people like us who use screens too much, that no one will come unless you give a positive and legible cry for help.
The reassurance of course, is about status and reputation. We still like you. We’re here for you. We’re still cool. Consider status a measure of the health of your social ties, which many people terminally value and in present society still provides instrumental, material value (jobs, places to crash, mutual aid, marketing / audience building for your future startup, …).
It makes sense to think of relationships as things that are built that have their own health instead of purely thinking of material output. The future is uncertain. You can’t model that far. You might get more returns later by investing now. More speculative, i think the drive to relate to others is borne from an ancient desire to form contracts with other agents to combine into (partial?) superagents. like bees in a hive.
Indeed people often play low status, small, energy preserving lying down curling up, frowny crying—in order to signal other people for reassurance. This gets trained out of people like us who use screens too much, that no one will come unless you give a positive and legible cry for help.
The reassurance of course, is about status and reputation. We still like you. We’re here for you. We’re still cool. Consider status a measure of the health of your social ties, which many people terminally value and in present society still provides instrumental, material value (jobs, places to crash, mutual aid, marketing / audience building for your future startup, …).
It makes sense to think of relationships as things that are built that have their own health instead of purely thinking of material output. The future is uncertain. You can’t model that far. You might get more returns later by investing now. More speculative, i think the drive to relate to others is borne from an ancient desire to form contracts with other agents to combine into (partial?) superagents. like bees in a hive.