Permission to get off the status ‘treadmill’
OPINION: The game of using luxury purchases like designer clothing, flash cars and always carrying the latest tech is a mug’s game, inventor Grant Ryan reckons.
Ryan says given the angst that social status causes, and given it’s ‘‘notwinnable’’, it’s time we didmore to develop mindsets that stopped judging people by the clothes on their backs, and more by the content of their character, and contribution to society.
Mathematically we can’t all be in the top 10 per cent by wealth and income, and yet society needs its nurses, police, teachers, janitors, cinema attendants and trash-removal people, he says.
‘‘[So] why do we look down on people?’’
He also asks why so many of us seem so willing to sacrifice so much personally to look like we are richer thanwe really are.
‘‘Status is like a treadmill,’’ Ryan says.
‘‘There is no way to win it. I’m trying to explain how it works, and give you permission to step off it, and realise you don’t go flying backwards.’’
The permission comes in the form of his book Comparonimics, and its matching website, which let people compare their lives with previous generations to get amore realistic view of how wealthy they really are.
Ryan tells the story of a man he knows who moaned about never having time and feeling stressed about money buying himself a new carwith a loan, necessitating him to work harder and stress more.
No-one but him cared what he looked like driving to work, Ryan says.
He would have been objectively better off, financially and emotionally, owning an eight-year-old Toyota.
So why didn’t he?
Pursuing status gain through luxury purchases is as old as humanity.
In his book The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies, Jared Diamond notes: ‘‘Cro-Magnons tens of thousands of years ago traded obsidian spear points necessary for hunting meat, shells and amber useful purely for decoration and beautiful finely finished spear points of translucent quartz.
‘‘The Cro-Magnons presumably no more dreamed of using their quartz spear points in hunting and thereby risking breaking them than we would use our best Gucci handbag to carry home our fishing purchase drippingwith redolent fish oil from the seafood market.’’
Perhaps Ryan is being unrealistic to expect humans can en masse turn their backs on millennia of this tendency.
Not at all, he says. Societies historically tended to be bigoted (sexist, racist, homophobic), and now most people he knows include anyone else’s gender, race or sexuality in the list of things to judge them on.
He sees no reason why another shift can’t happen. It’s already begun. The painfully acute awareness of social norms is no longer society’s pole star.
In modern society, you have the kinds of freedoms that traditional societies frowned on.
You can, within the bounds of irreducible societal expectations (abiding by the law, wearing clean clothes, brushing your teeth or listening when other people are talking) decide to reject certain manifestations of status.
One group which chooses to do this are people who focus less on possessing a show of wealth, than possessing actual wealth.
At its extreme, this is the Fire community, which stands for financially independent, retire early.
They have shifted their sense of status from the ownership of luxury items, andmagazinequality interior design to something they prizemore: financial freedom.
This is, in part, the freedom to get off the treadmill, even if they decide they don’t want to.
They save and invest hard, and embed themselves in supportive online communities providing them with status among a peer group.
I tend to think they overestimate the ‘‘retire early’’ bit (people have a burning need to be relevant and useful), but the lesser financial freedom their way of doing things brings is the one I prize: The freedom not to have to worry too much about money.