There is a sort of classic observation here that people who proclaim not to care about X sure seem to care a lot about X since they bothered to proclaim as much.
And indeed, I think that goes on a lot with status. This makes sense, especially for people who are losing the status games they find themselves playing. It’s both a psychological coping mechanism to deal with the cognitive dissonance of finding one’s self low status when expecting to be higher status, and a bid to create an alternative status hierarchy where they can be high status.
Well-adjusted people who aren’t celebrities know that the only way to win at status in the modern era is to become part of an alternative status hierarchy. This might mean being high status at work, at school, in a hobby, at church, in a friend group, or even just in your own house among your family. Heck, I think a non-trivial amount of why people like having pets is that pets treat their owners as high status!
But some people get stuck here. They can’t figure out how to get on top of any status hierarchy because they don’t really understand how status works. They don’t have an intuitive model of it, also don’t have an explicit model, and thus feel like status is some kind of blackbox that’s out to get them.
The only solution for the autistic is likely to simply learn how status explicitly works and learn to manually master it, same as any other complex game can be mastered.
There is a sort of classic observation here that people who proclaim not to care about X sure seem to care a lot about X since they bothered to proclaim as much.
And indeed, I think that goes on a lot with status. This makes sense, especially for people who are losing the status games they find themselves playing. It’s both a psychological coping mechanism to deal with the cognitive dissonance of finding one’s self low status when expecting to be higher status, and a bid to create an alternative status hierarchy where they can be high status.
Well-adjusted people who aren’t celebrities know that the only way to win at status in the modern era is to become part of an alternative status hierarchy. This might mean being high status at work, at school, in a hobby, at church, in a friend group, or even just in your own house among your family. Heck, I think a non-trivial amount of why people like having pets is that pets treat their owners as high status!
But some people get stuck here. They can’t figure out how to get on top of any status hierarchy because they don’t really understand how status works. They don’t have an intuitive model of it, also don’t have an explicit model, and thus feel like status is some kind of blackbox that’s out to get them.
The only solution for the autistic is likely to simply learn how status explicitly works and learn to manually master it, same as any other complex game can be mastered.