The Paradox of Prestige
Why do we care about the opinions of strangers?
Hey there! Quick note. This is part #2 of an essay series that explores the idea of Performance-Based Love, which relates to topics like prestige, labels, and external validation. Read the first essay here:
“So what do you want to do with that?”
Last year, I met medical student at a coffee shop. After I told him I was a writer, he asked me this. One part of me was like, “duh, fuckface, I want to be a writer.” I frowned on the inside. I felt insecure. But I also felt frustrated because I couldn’t exactly explain how my path played out.
Looking back on this, I was fascinated: why was I so worried about what he thought?
This encounter showed me the paradox of prestige: we obsess over the opinions of people we don’t even know.
Why do we do this?
In my last essay, I wrote that in our society, we equate being loved and accepted with doing things that are easily explainable to others. As Eric Jorgenson wrote in Career Advice for Uniquely Ambitious People:
“The observable parts of your job is what impresses people in bars and makes you sound successful at your high school reunion. Social Status is what drives most people, whether they realize it or not. That is why they are willing to put up with otherwise shitty and miserable circumstances, so they can be impressive.”
But still, why does this happen?
It’s because when we see someone for the first time, we automatically make assumptions. Snap judgments. We create stories in our heads about them based on one tiny little data point. It could be based on a label, like “vegetarian.” Or it could be based on something physical, like a terrible tattoo of tits on a calf muscle.
As it turns out, the reasons we make snap judgments are the same reasons that explain the paradox of prestige.
We obsess over the opinions of other people because:
We want to belong.
We are lazy little bitches.
Let me show you how this works.
The Mercedes
When I told people that I was a college student at CU Boulder studying Integrative Physiology and pre-med, that sounded sick. I also felt fine because there were tens of thousands of other students saying the same thing. I was one of the many people on this prestigious path. It was also something my parents could brag about to their friends. “Omg guys, he’s going to be doctor.”
The first reason we make snap judgments is because we want to see if someone fits our own frame of reality. We wonder: is he “acceptable” to me? But this is also mirrored: “am I acceptable to him?”
In the ad psychology book Ca$hvertising, Drew Eric Whitman wrote about a concept called the Life Force 8. As humans, we are biologically designed with eight desires. No surprise—one of them is social approval.1
This is best seen in the case of car consumerism:
“The people who buy a Mercedes often want to belong to that special group of Mercedes owners. Do you think it’s because of the special braking or suspension system? Forget it. They’re not going out and spending megabucks to buy something that’s maybe slightly better than many of the other automobiles.”2
- Joe Sugarman, The Adweek Copywriting Handbook
Going to college was normal—and therefore, acceptable—even if my parents were pissing away $15K every single semester for me to memorize stuff that I would forget the first day after finals. The strangest part: even though I saved my parents over $50,000 on tuition, that didn’t feel like a win because what I was doing wasn’t normal.3
At the time, I knew nobody who was doing what I was doing. I didn’t have a tribe to take me in. I hadn’t yet met all these wonderful Twitter writers working online. So of course I felt out of place. I really struggled telling people, “I’m a writer.” I didn’t own it—even though I wrote every day. All because it wasn’t easily explainable and acceptable to the people I surrounded myself with.
This is really why we worry about what other people think. It comes from our deeper desire to belong and by extension be seen, heard, loved, and appreciated.
But still, there’s another unanswered question: why does our society stroke the ephemeral ego of easily explainable evidence?
Lazy Little Labels
When I introduce myself, I could say, “I sit my fat ass down on a chair and type on a Macbook for three hours every morning.”
Or I could just say, “I’m a writer.”
Label exist because they’re efficient.
When I met the med student, his label was like the nutrition facts of an orange: juicy with data. “Medical student” told me that his favorite hobby was sleeping. It told me that he used an Apple Pencil and lived in the library. It told me that we was going to be a doctor—a noble pursuit—and would probably make over $100K a year until he retired.
But what about being a writer?
“Writer” warrants more questions than “doctor” because the trajectory of my life doesn’t have a template. What do you write about? Fiction or nonfiction? Books or blogs? How do you make money? Do you do drugs?
To best illustrate the laziness of labels, let’s revisit the example of the Linked-In post from my last essay:
“Hey everyone, I’m so proud to announce that I just landed an unpaid internship—yes, unpaid—at Harvard this summer. Look at me, I’m really cool. Also, I don’t care if it sucks because it sounds sick. And to make money, I’m gonna get rid of grease at McDonald’s.”
It feels appropriate to assume that our friend at Harvard is happy because it’s a simple shortcut. When we tell people what we do for work, we overemphasize the easily explainable evidence because it’s easier.
So how does this relate to our obsession with the opinions of others?
The Rate of Acceptance
Given that we are lazy and that we want to belong, we tend to adopt identities that make us feel accepted by the greatest number of people in the shortest amount of time. In math terms, this means that we fixate on the fastest rate of acceptance.4
I’ll summarize this with simple logic:
1) If you can explain something easily, then it’s probably normal.
2) If it’s normal, then it’s acceptable.
3) Therefore, if you can explain something easily, then it’s probably acceptable.
The inverse of this is if you can’t explain it easily, then it’s probably not normal, and therefore, people won’t accept you. But we must keep in mind: these are the type of people that probably already forgot your first name—strangers.5
Since snap judgments are shortcuts that we use to accept or reject strangers, there’s a more precise definition of prestige: looking cool for cognitively lazy people who even don’t know you.
Normal = Acceptable
All of this tracks back to Performance-Based Love. Because of the stories society tells us, we think that people will love us differently depending on what we do. Our acceptance is based on certain conditions. If you do X, people will love you.
But prestige is relative. Society sets the standards for what’s prestigious and what’s normal. As I’ve hinted at earlier in this essay, normal is just a synonym for acceptable.6
It took me some time to realize that I’m not normal. I’m not. But since I was looking for the approval of some stranger who was normal, of course I wouldn't feel accepted by him.
But just because I’m not normal doesn’t mean that I’m not acceptable. So while I couldn't even articulate any of this at the time, this is why I felt the deep calling to drive down to Austin: to be around the other Internet weirdos and content creators.
Now as I write this, I’m in a similar situation as I was a year ago: I still write every day. I still haven’t directly made money from my own writing. But now when I say, “I’m a writer,” I own it. I stuffed all that insecurity into an incinerator and blew the ashes away with the intensity of a leaf blower.
In the next essay, I’ll explore how I escaped the pull of prestige and learned how to feel fine with doing what I’m doing. Stay tuned:
P.S. If you liked this essay, you’ll probably love this one:
Notes
Here’s full list from the Life Force 8, verbatim:
1. Survival, enjoyment of life, life extension. 2. Enjoyment of food and beverages. 3. Freedom from fear, pain, and danger. 4. Sexual companionship. 5. Comfortable living conditions. 6. To be superior, winning, keeping up with the Joneses. 7. Care and protection of loved ones. 8. Social approval.
The sorority sticker on the car. The college football hat. The company that you work at. Even if it’s as flamboyant as a gay-pride poster—not that there’s anything wrong with that—all of these things are just ways to tell other people, “hey, I belong with these other humans.”
This is why Apple’s 1997 “Think Different” TV ad never mentioned a computer. It only showed faces of history’s heroes: Gandhi, Einstein, MLK, Picasso, and more. These people were rebels, much like Steve Jobs. So the real reason someone bought an Apple computer was emotional: they wanted to identify with the group of people who thought differently and who wanted to creatively express themselves.
Let’s say that it’s a sunny day and you’re walking outside on a trail. You look up and see a cardinal perched on a tree branch. While you admire his pointy red hair, he takes a shit on your shoe. Magically, in that piece of poop you find a tiny flash drive that has over $50,000 on it. What a win, right? Not necessarily with me leaving college. Of course, I wasn’t paying, but still, the absurdity goes back to the basic need of belonging.
But there's a tragedy of always fitting in and pleasing everyone. As Jim Carrey so eloquently said in his 2014 commencement speech:
“Your need for acceptance can make you invisible in this world. Don’t let anything stand in the way of the light that shines through this form. Risk being seen in all of your glory.”
I was also worried about what the med student thought because I didn’t accept myself. As I wrote in essay #1 of this series, “His skepticism also pissed me off, but he was probably just mirroring my own lack of self acceptance.”
Something I didn't even touch on here is Rene Girard's concept of mimesis, which is the idea that we tend to imitate other people because desires are contagious. Society’s stories impact who we think we should be and what we think we should want.
In The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand wrote something similar:
"Don't you know that most people take most things because that's what's given them, and they have no opinion whatever? Do you wish to be guided by what they expect you to think they think or by your own judgment?"
loving this series! I've been thinking about external validation a lot recently too. A lot of labels we don't actually value, but we want to *become* the person we think is worthy of that label. So we're in a backwards process: we want a label because it proves something about us. but really, labels should come naturally as a result of doing actions we love