Why Can't Comfortable People Stop Chasing Status?

David Geary says full satisfaction is hard for a lot of people, because social status has a clear relation to the mortality risk of a person and of the children. Moving up a status hierarchy improved the odds of survival, and the odds the children survived, especially in a plague or a food shortage. Higher status meant lower risk. The timing of a crash is unknowable: another group might invade, a plague might hit, or a growing season might fail. The result is an arms race inside the species. A person has to keep moving up a little, as a buffer for when the bottom falls out.

The same pressure feeds social comparison. A lot of social media is flaunting and showing off, and people then compare themselves with others. Self-awareness, in his account, supports the comparison: a person can see the competencies that are moving other people up, look at their own skills, and think about how to improve. Most people in the Western world live comfortable lives, with a lot of resources and little violence relative to history, so in absolute terms things are great and some people can kick back. A lot of people cannot turn the drive off. Ancestrally the push would have been adaptive. Feeling satisfied at bedtime matters less, on his account, than being driven enough to keep pushing.