Originally posted on LinkedIn on Feb 6, 2024
All nature is complex, but human beings are especially so. The faculty to create and appreciate artistic expression, the ability to discover, organize and disseminate knowledge, and the sacrificial instinct that underlies heroism and unconditional love are but a few examples.
Considering our wondrous nature, is anyone else confounded by why and how we are so easily distracted by the mundane (examples: wow, they live in *that* neighborhood; *how many* followers does he have?; she sold her company for *how* much?)
Status. How do we measure it? And what does how we measure it reveal?
To me, using opposable thumbs to put on socks is higher up the “big deal” scale than a piece of paper with H-A-R-V-A-R-D printed on it. But we stop applauding sock-wearing after humans turn five. Instead, we tend to celebrate, admire, and yes, covet, pecking-order achievements. Why? I posit we are fascinated with our own competence, which translates into a need for validation of our specialness.
However, this need for validation is the toxic seed from which envy sprouts. Oh, if only I had the money, power or attractiveness that person has…then I would *know* I am special. Isn’t it ironic that striving for and achieving this specialness produces the boringly predictable result that we simply start coveting the next un-havable thing?
So many of us spend our lives struggling with this that I would like to frame this paradox non-pejoratively, to invite thoughtful reflection. I put it thus:
1) We know our individual lives, measured in the context of seven billion people and millennia of history, are ultimately irrelevant. In 10,000 years will anyone care who wins the 2024 election, much less who is writing this post?
2) Yet, despite our ordinariness, we long to feel special, to be seen, to be respected, to be recognized as unique – we carry an inner sense that we are immeasurably significant in the face of a perfectly logical argument to the contrary.
Is our obsession with status a construct by which we attempt to reconcile this paradox? To convince ourselves we are special, perhaps we conscientiously ignore the complexity that makes us wondrous (but which is universal) to focus on crude pecking order attributes such as money, power, beauty (because they are scarce). An ancient king wrote: “Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.”
What if we inverted our paradox response? Imagine a world in which we embrace our wondrous complexity rather than chasing the pecking order. In so doing, would we be freed to behave in a way that those around us might feel sufficient enough, loved enough, special enough, that they too, would relinquish attachment to pecking-order achievements? Is deeper satisfaction only one perspective change on status away?
J