I am a good architect, a pro at my craft, but I don’t have a car, and at the office they consider me a loser. Among my acquaintances, I know examples of people who are talented but live modestly, or just barely make ends meet. Sometimes this traps them in a conditional framework of poverty. Can an ascetic lifestyle correlate with success, and vice versa? Is a conditional car or an iPhone bought on credit an indicator of success?
Gvidon
Hello, you are listening to the program “Status,” in the studio are Ekaterina Schulmann and I, Michael Naki… Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.
The demonstration of status is a very ancient cultural quirk which, as far as one can judge, has accompanied humanity since pre-rational times. Its purpose is quite clear. The demonstration of status exists to save effort. Having once won in a competitive struggle, a person can continue to confirm their position as a winner through new clashes, but this is a rather burdensome strategy. However, if a tradition has developed in society that status is confirmed by some identifying mark, then it is convenient for both the person who has the status—they do not need to spend energy on confirming it every minute—and the person who does not have the status—they do not risk running into a strong opponent out of ignorance and simply will not get in their way.
Usually, status was confirmed through the possession of certain rare artifacts. Obviously, many were tempted to acquire these very rare artifacts without actually earning the status, which effectively means forging a certificate. Naturally, this led to such forgeries being strictly prosecuted: in some places commoners were forbidden from wearing lace, in others slaves were forbidden from wearing belts—who knows how many such rules the rich human imagination can invent!
As society transitioned from a class-based system to a model where a person’s status clearly correlated with their wealth, conspicuous consumption blossomed. Every society goes through this stage in its own way; the surge of such conspicuous consumption after the collapse of socialism in the USSR was quite curious. All those anecdotal gold chains as thick as a finger are exactly that.
However, egalitarian trends in society, as well as the multi-factored nature of the concept of status itself, have led to the fact that shoving demonstrative attributes of wealth in people’s faces is no longer fashionable. Why? Because a single scale of statuses has disappeared. You might be a billionaire, while your interlocutor is an FSB colonel, or the Pope, or a world tennis champion. Whose status is higher is determined by the context, which means this entire complex system of visual markers begins to work poorly—and gradually disappears due to lack of necessity. Kadyrov wears tracksuits, Zuckerberg wears a t-shirt, monarchs wear jeans, prime ministers ride bicycles—complete Sodom and Gomorrah, in short. People with means choose things based on their functionality, not on their status.
On the other hand, the status race still continues at the grassroots level. A vacation in Nice beats a vacation in Turkey, an iPhone beats a Huawei, and having a car beats not having one, even if the car owner has switched to instant noodles to afford it, while the one without it takes taxis and doesn’t give it a second thought. Also, in wealthy corporations, an employee may be required to engage in certain status consumption simply to demonstrate the company’s success.
It makes sense to obsess over conspicuous consumption where it actually allows for smoothing over edges and building informal hierarchies for everyone’s convenience. Moreover, the aforementioned multi-factored nature of statuses allows you to maneuver within fairly wide limits. Let’s say it is too costly for you to demonstrate status in the workplace by buying a car because you already have a mortgage and need to get a child ready for school—but you can be the life of the party, and at any corporate event, you are the one entrusted with the opening remarks. And, by the way, during one of those speeches, nothing stops you from selling your colleagues the line that the material demonstration of status is a sign of poverty, and that the “right” people have long since moved from collecting things to collecting experiences.
