The Status Game

My first book of 2025 came as a Christmas present but delivered an eye-opening look at how deeply status influences our lives, often in ways we don’t even realize.

This book dives deep into the invisible forces that drive so much of what we do: our endless pursuit of status. Whether it’s at work, in relationships, or on social media, Storr reveals how status games shape our identities, decisions, and even our societies. It’s both fascinating and a little unsettling to realize how much of our lives revolve around these hidden competitions.

A few key takeaways that really stuck with me:

- Status isn’t just about wealth or power—it’s about “value” in the eyes of others, a fundamental human need that shapes our behaviour, decisions, and even our happiness. 

- We’re all players in multiple status games in work, relationships, and society, often without even realizing it. These games can be broken down in 3 varieties of status-thriving through:

      1. dominance: through fear or force, like in mafias and armies.

      2. virtue: playing the game in an obedient, dutiful manner like in religions or authorities.

      3. success: achieving well-defined objectives through skill, talent or knowledge like in sports or corporations.

- Understanding these games can help us navigate them more consciously and even rewrite the rules.

What I loved most was how Storr blends psychology, history, and storytelling to make complex ideas accessible and engaging. The book is like a mirror that forces you to reflect on your own motivations and behaviours. 

Two of my favorite quotes from The Status Game are:

“When researchers analysed 186 premodern societies around the world, they found men of higher status invariably had greater wealth and more wives and provided better nourishment for their children. This was, and remains, the secret of maximizing our capacity for survival and reproduction: the higher we rise, the more likely we are to live, love and procreate. It’s the essence of human thriving. It’s the status game.”

 and

"It (the brain) generates explanations about our perceptions, memories and actions and the relationships among them. This leads to a personal narrative, the story that ties together all the disparate aspects of our conscious experience into a coherent whole: order from chaos. This story may be completely wrong. It often is. That ‘YOU’ that you are so proud of is a story woven together by your interpreter module to account for as much of your behaviour as it can incorporate, and it denies and rationalises the rest.”

If you’re interested in psychology, leadership, human nature or just want to understand why we do the things we do, I do recommend The Status Game.