Bad Ways to Signal Status

And good

Photo courtesy of Gareth Ellis

What do Andrew Tate, iPhone, and BMW all have in common?

They all represent one thing: they are how low-status people signal high status.

The only people who think Andrew Tate is a good model for masculinity are men who have no self-esteem (or women who like men with no self-esteem). They look at him and see someone who “gets things” — by taking them, like an ordinary playground bully — and think, “yes, I’d also like to have things. This guy must be onto something.” And before you know it they start thinking and talking just like him — like some half-wit barbarian who has yet to reach the age of twelve.

BMW drivers, as a general rule, want all the status that comes with a high-performance and high-aesthetic vehicle — and they’re willing to buy an awful vehicle in service of that goal (especially if it’s used). Germans are great at engineering, but BMWs are notoriously unreliable and high-maintenance machines. Great engineering and making a good car are two separate things.

Buying a BMW, for most people, is a status goal. The reason I know that is because most people are caught off guard by how much work and money are required to maintain them (and fix them when they break). BMWs are made by engineers for people who think like engineers. If you’re not willing to spend thousands of dollars and dozens of hours per year worrying about your car’s performance, you shouldn’t buy a BMW. In other words, almost no one should buy a BMW. Because very few people think that way. Very few people want to put that much effort into a car that they only bought to look or feel cool in the first place.

It has always been a status thing.

And there’s a confusing dynamic with BMW drivers: I’m not sure whether self-righteous jackasses tend to buy BMWs, or BMWs tend to turn people into self-righteous jackasses by osmosis. I’m not sure which one’s the chicken and which one’s the egg. But I almost never see a BMW using a turn signal, and I almost always see them driving like they’re perpetually 20 minutes late everywhere, and it’s everyone else’s problem.

Every time I see a BMW driver (or a driver of a massive pickup truck, which never has anything in the bed or on the hitch by the way) riding people’s asses and changing lanes with this loud, desperate sort of pushiness, I think to myself, “hey man, maybe you should just leave your house earlier.”

Or maybe you should just grow up and stop buying status vehicles that only a small group of low-status people think are cool, and everyone else automatically hates you for.

It’s embarrassing how many people I’ve met who insist on iPhone’s blue bubbles. If you don’t have iMessage, they’ll say, we can’t be friends. And the worst part is, they’re serious. These people actually think that they’re achieving status by having blue text message bubbles. And they actually think that you’re lower in status than them for not having said bubbles. It’s the most low-status way to signal high status I’ve ever seen in my life.

There are actually adults who think this way, and will treat you differently based on what color your messages appear on their $2,000 48-month financed screens. Screens which they pay for by selling their souls to corporate jobs that no one cares about so they can continue buying the newest blue-bubble-displaying screens to keep displaying new blue bubbles.

Yikes, bro. That doesn’t seem very high-status to me.

The point is, you should always be questioning the way people display status. And you should always be questioning in which ways you display status, in relation to those people. Because if you’re displaying status in a way that low-status people display status, high-status people see you as low-status. And if you’re actually trying to achieve anything, being high-status to low-status people is a bad game. That’s like being the first loser, the king of a trash heap.

Truly high-status people don’t bother buying something like a BMW unless they enjoy the maintenance. Which, to be fair, some people do. But is that the average person? No. That’s not even the average BMW buyer. Most BMW purchases are status at the expense of terrible inconvenience — all of which only impresses low-status people in the first place.

The reason Lexus is the perfect car is because it doesn’t pretend the average person is interested in maintenance. It’s just a perfect machine, without you having to do anything. All you have to do is buy it.

Japanese automakers do one big thing right: they confer status on the customer by making machines that just work. They cater to the American dream of just buying a thing and never thinking about it again. That is status. At least here it is.

Truly high-status people like calm, wise men. Not desperately flashy men who shove their manliness in people’s faces. High status is being a great man and earning great relationships, not sitting around bloviating about what a great man is.

Truly high-status people have better things to do than talk about which color their texts are.

When someone insists on BMW, or Andrew Tate, or blue text bubbles, I immediately dismiss them as a person.

The same way I do with people who think that their Ivy League education makes them better than others, even when they can’t do basic adult problem-solving in real life. As if their premier education excuses them from having to learn basic life and relationship skills. In fact, it usually just gets in the way directly. Kids from rich families never have to do things like fix their own pipes or replace their own tires — which in my eyes actually makes them low-status people. There’s nobility in filth. There’s dignity in the undignified.

The big question to ask yourself is not “how can I display status?”. The big question, if you’re serious about status, is “how do the people that I like, and I want to be like, display status?”. If you want to be seen as a wise person, you don’t try to impress people who are not wise. Because that would be a waste of a wise person’s time.

You must act as if.

If you want to be a person who is good with money, you don’t try to display wealth to people who don’t have any.

If you want to be seen as a great parent, you don’t do things to impress people who are bad parents. Like, for instance, sitting around boasting about how much of a tyrant you are and how you threaten all your daughters’ boyfriends. Only a jackass would think that’s an impressive character trait, and only a fool would be impressed by it.

In the world of middle managers, you're more likely to get ahead if you signal that the only status you care about is your status at work. You're willing to kiss the proper asses, avoid making (any) friends at work, and play the bureaucratic game in order to achieve higher clout in the building. And the tradeoff is often that you have lower status with the people below you, especially the greatest workers. In other words, you're trading high status with the bureaucracy for low status with the people actually doing all the work.

And, if you’re like me, it’s the people who do great work whose respect I’d rather have anyway. Simply because that makes life more interesting. Because interesting people are interesting. People who live and breathe the bureaucracy aren’t.

Similarly, many people’s political beliefs are little more than a status game. This occurs mostly on the left, although it’s prevalent on the right with certain cultish beliefs as well. In the game of weaponized compassion, you’re rewarded for wielding the biggest club. Or having the largest chip on your shoulder. All so you can impress other people in this status hierarchy of compassion and victimhood. And at some point you ought to ask yourself, are these people even worth impressing? What are they doing with their lives other than strutting around like peacocks opening their feathers?

If you’re willing to use AI as a writer to make profits, attract subscribers, and gain clout… whom are you gaining clout with? People who are okay with using AI. In other words, not serious writers. Not serious thinkers. Not people who love the process and the craft of writing. Maybe that’s okay with you. But it’s certainly worth thinking about.

It’s the same thing as using steroids to build your body. Will you gain clout with some people? Sure you will. But who are those people? People who are impressed by artificial results. To me personally, that’s just not interesting. But to each one’s own.

In every teenage comedy-drama TV show, the bully is always the exact same person. He signals his status among the outcasts by being crude and mean and ruthless. But whom is he signaling his status to? Only the other outcasts. Everyone else just thinks he’s a loser. A baby whose mother never weaned him. A big shadow cast by a small tree.

This is how all bullies operate: they signal bad status to good people and good status to bad people. And whom do they end up impressing in life? Only bad people. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle where they get left behind by upstanding society — not because they’re outcasts by nature, but because they continue to make decisions that make it impossible for good people to respect them.

It’s rare for a feedback loop to start and then continue forever just based on who you are or how or where you happened to be born. Almost no one is “born” to be a total loser. Once you’re born, it’s all about your decisions. It’s all about what status you signal, and to whom you signal it. Every playground bully could turn his life around in a single week. People, most of the time, embrace a turnaround story. But the bully clings to the status of being a known bad guy rather than have a short transitional period to being a good guy.

Because, after all, who likes giving up status? Even bad status. Even for a moment. Status is a warm blanket, and the world is cold.

I’m one of those old-school guys: I display status by acting like I don’t give a shit about it. How ‘90s punk-rock of me. I was once told I’m so James Dean. That’s completely untrue. I can’t pull off a tight T-shirt the way James Dean could.

Everyone cares about status. We can all be honest about that. If you ever open your mouth and speak opinions, you care about status. If you own anything other than burlap sacks for clothes, you care about status. Having status is a worthwhile part of human life — it earns you relationships of various shapes and sizes, and relationships are worth having. In fact relationships are the only thing worth having. Everything else is merely a way of earning and maintaining relationships.

But always be cognizant of what your status-signaling behaviors say about you, and to whom they’re saying it.

Drink some water and effortlessly rock a white T-shirt.

JR

“A genius among techies and an asshole among shitheads.” - Sebastian Ibarra, Cyberpunk 2077