2022: The Year of Status

New Year's resolutions are awful. At least, that's what fast-talking, faceless YouTuber CGP Grey claims. Grey argues that instead of resolutions, we should focus on themes. So today, I'm going to explain my theme for 2022. There are three reasons I'm writing this: (1) as I'm writing this first paragraph, I don't have a clear view of my theme, so I'm using this essay to clarify it; (2) I want to create some accountability around my theme, so I'm sharing it with you; (3) I want to invite you to share your themes or goals with me! Let me know your dreams for 2022 in a comment.

What is a yearly theme? CGP Grey did a brief video on it and explains more in a nearly 2 hour podcast. Here's my brief summary. Goals and resolutions are weak because success is too narrow. If you set a goal to read 30 books and you only read 29, you missed your goal. On the other hand, a theme guides your year while making many opportunities for success. If your 2022 theme was the Year of Reading, then your focus is on reading more on the margin. Tempted to mindlessly browse twitter for an hour? Your yearly theme pops up and asks, "How about opening that book instead?"

What theme is guiding my year? I have decided to make 2022 the Year of Status. The nice thing about the interpretation can have many layers. So let me explain what I mean by status and how it's going to influence my decisions on the margin.

Status is a feeling of admiration or value you receive as you interact with our social world. In his book The Status Game, Will Storr argues that we constantly play games with society to try and win status. Maybe the most obvious one is a social media platform like Twitter, where status is granted through likes and follows and users work to give and receive status. But Storr makes the case that status games not only have a longer history than modern social media, they are the foundation for human society. Want to gain status in your tribe? Feed it. Protect it. Expand it. Status games reward players for their contributions.

This already makes for a strange yearly theme. Most self-help experts would push me not to define my success by what society thinks of me. I should define my own values. Storr contends we can't. Even when we try to reject status games, we are just choosing to play another status game. Suppose I say, "Losing weight is a terrible goal. That's just me wanting to conform to society's definition of a high-status body. I'm just going to focus on eating better, and if I lose weight then it's just a nice side effect." You are leaving a game of success, defined by whether you hit a goal weight, and have entered a game of virtue, defined by the beliefs you hold. You can't escape status games (see the note at the end of the essay for one counterexample).

Well, if you can't escape status games, then you might as well use them to improve your life. Here are some of my ideas on how I can use status games to accomplish more this year.

Acknowledge the status games I play. Just recognizing the status games I play has helped me see how they shape my behavior. Status games have symbols of success and rules to achieve those symbols. Then those symbols create a status hierarchy. You all know one status game I play: YouTube. The symbols of success include subscriber counts and views, and YouTube created the silver play button for channels that reach 100,000 subscribers as an additional symbol of status. But there are rules to achieving these symbols: no buying subscribers or views.

But I play many other status games too. I'm an economics professor, and academia has its own status game. The symbols of success include journal publications and citations, maybe recognition in the public sphere. The rules are that you can't fake your data and you must publish your work in a respected journal. The hierarchy is reflected in where you publish your work and which institution employs you.

This leads to a second way I can use status games to help me. Be intentional about the status games I play. After I acknowledged which games I was playing, I realized I could choose which ones I wanted to keep playing. I can see now that when when I started my YouTube channel in 2018, I was frustrated with my success in the academic status game. I realized that I was never going to be an MIT professor and certainly not a Nobel laureate. By starting a YouTube channel, I was implicitly opting to play a new status game where I thought I could see greater success. Now I want to be more intentional about it.

Being intentional about my status games means recognizing when my actions are motivated by seeking status and deciding whether that is a game I want to play. For example, many tweets broadcast recent accomplishments (success games) or signal certain beliefs (virtue games), hoping to attract status through likes and follows. A few times this week I began a tweet only to realize that the sole purpose was to seek status. I paused at those and asked why I cared, and I abandoned them. In fact, I went days this week without checking Twitter because I decided instead of seeking status there, I could get more personal value from reading.

This leads to another benefit of focusing on status: recognizing when status-seeking in one game interferes with my other goals (probably status in another game). As an academic and YouTube educator, I want to focus on learning truth. But Julia Galef in The Scout Mindset discusses how status games can interfere with discovering truth. She argues that in virtue games we get so attached to the status associated with one belief that we refuse to assess whether the belief is actually true. If I'm more aware of the status games I play, then I can accomplish more with the things I value.

But status games are not just about receiving status. We all participate in giving status to others. So this year I want to be more liberal in granting status to others. One idea that comes to mind is setting a culture in my classes that allows my students to receive status for their contributions. Ben Horrowitz in his book What You Do Is Who You Are talks about how you can shape cultures to produce more status. He gives an example of how Uber at the early days gave status to those who were fiercely competitive. But this culture led to ethical issues, including the failure to pursue a sexual harassment case because it would reduce someone's status. That was an unintended consequence of an intentional status game.

I can setup my status games to hopefully produce good results for my students. My first economics professor had his own way of doing this. His class was widely known as one of the hardest on campus. But at the end of every semester, he would send a letter to anyone who got an A, encouraging them to major in economics. When I got one, it was a huge status boost! I think I might even still have that letter. The funny thing was that it was a form letter. It was a relatively low-cost action for him, yet the status it granted made a difference for a lot of people. Could I do something similar?

Thanks for joining me on my journey through understanding my desires for the year ahead. Do you have a theme for the year? It doesn't have to be a theme. If you have goals or resolutions I would love to hear those too. Comment below. Or if you want a low-cost way to give me some status, like this post.

Note: While Storr argues we cannot escape status games, I think a lot of the Jesus Christ's teachings reject the pursuit of status. "Therefore when thou does thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men"(Matthew 6:2). See also Matthew 25, where Christ says eternal status comes from serving those who have low status on Earth. Of course, Storr would argue that Christ is just establishing a new status game and I'm deluding myself in a dream that my status game is actually good. And maybe Julia Galef would say I'm letting my beliefs block truth. But I think one of the appeals (and truths) of Christianity is the rejection of status games.