Status Anxiety

On dressing to impress

Photo by elCarito on Unsplash

An editing client of mine, a guy who had been the first in his family to graduate college, once told me that buying and wearing a nice wristwatch had solved more interpersonal problems when he first started working in an office environment than his competence or professional demeanor by an order of magnitude.

Status

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is a major motivating factor for most people. It is, in fact, the first thing the majority of people look for when they assess you to determine how they should treat you.

The ways people determine your social status, and the tells they most commonly look for, are many and various, but they fall into a few broad categories, and with a few tweaks for personal specifics, you can learn to optimize your presentation for any situation or social group.

The Rollins High School Theory of Social Dynamics

Consider that in most cases, people don’t really grow up. High school is the terminal degree most people get in social/emotional maturity. It really is a “fish don’t have a word for water” situation, too, because virtually everyone attended high school, so most of us don’t notice that a substantial proportion of our self-concept (which is in no small part imposed upon us by our social environment) calcifies by senior year. Virtually every adult interaction we ever have to deal with afterwards requires only minor variations on social skills we learned between 9th and 12th grade, when we were socialized to behave in ways congruent with our environment and our role within it

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Since most of us don't change that much, reducing to high school to solve the social math problem of who another person is, as I recommend in the article above, is a useful heuristic—it’s a “good enough” sorting mechanism

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. From that rough cut, you can refine further. Some examples of how you can do this, both basic and advanced, are below.

• Start by determining economic class, because it’s the easiest to pinpoint; how much money a person has is the most basic marker of status. The markers to look for are shoes, eyeglasses, and haircut.

• Shoes and eyeglasses are the accessories we replace the least frequently, so paying attention to them is a more accurate way to determine income than basing your assessment on clothing—a person can dress down more readily than they can replace their glasses, and dressing down muddies a person’s status more than dressing up.

• Zooming in further on shoes is one way to determine a person's social position as defined in the article above. This is because knowing how to dress appropriately is a marker of social fluency, and people who wear expensive shoes that are wrong for their outfit may have money, but they’re probably low-status within their class. If the shoes are appropriate to the outfit, that is a marker that the person is socially fluent in the language of his class

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• The way one wears one’s hair is indicative of both social and economic class, as well as serving to narrow the range of professions to which a person might belong. (Knowing what kind of car a person drives makes it even easier.) Economic class is the roughest cut for determining social status.

• Behavioral tells get you the position the person occupies within their tribe. I don’t know any women over college age who can’t do this with a glance, but the more attractive the woman, in general, the more clearly genuinely high-status behavior will stand out to her.

• If you have cottoned on to the fact that “the person” being observed in this article is you, and the point of view I am assuming is that of the women you presumably want to date, give yourself a pat on the back.

• What women look for in men with whom they’re interested in pursuing a romantic relationship (regardless of its duration) is safety, followed by social fluency. Women really want to know if you are a physical threat to them. (Believe it or not, they generally don’t mind if you’re a physical threat in the abstract as long as you aren’t belligerent to or around them, especially if they’re interested; guys who bemoan how chicks dig jerks fail to recognize that the aggressive behavior of the high-status men they’re complaining about is specifically calibrated to read as dangerous to them, but not to women.).

• Deportment is an (upcoming) article in and of itself, but briefly, the behavioral tells that reveal you to be both safe and desirable are all related to carrying yourself as if you don’t give a shit how you’re perceived

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• In his breakout essay, The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, Hunter S. Thompson relates how he uses a set of Playboy Magazine luggage tags to increase his social status. While undeniably a genius and one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, Thompson was a deeply antisocial, nightmarishly violent drug addict who frightened even his closest friends, and I do not endorse his lifestyle as a way to get ahead in the world. That said, there is a lesson in the story he tells about the way the tags were intended to be used: Let people come to their own conclusions about you, but have an idea of what those conclusions will be ahead of time.

• In order to make the above happen, you have to have an accurate read on your own personal style and behavior. I think therapy is a Good Thing, generally speaking, not only for its value in sorting out one’s psychological problems (which make people less desirable mates), but because therapists read people for a living and they can give you an accurate assessment of how you come across. A good therapist is a good starting point if you want to upgrade your life.

• Be aware of countersignalling, and be aware it is advanced math.

• Learning to dress well is not difficult, nor does it have to be expensive. There is at least one chapter in the Louis and Copeland book in the Homework Section on this. I will do a post on the theory behind it in the coming weeks.

• Social climbing is like doing the problems in the back of the book in a chapter on which you’re not being graded for a teacher that despises try-hards. What I mean by this is that setting yourself the goal of dating women who belong to a social class more than one remove in either direction from your own is a recipe for unhappiness. I recommend Class by Paul Fussell and The Complete Preppy Handbook by Lisa Birnbach (both of which are nominally satirical but in fact contain a treasure trove of accurate-if-dated information about social class, disguised as humor) if you want to understand the distinction between economic and social class, but basically, the upper, middle, and lower classes are tribes, and there are rich and poor in each. There are happy, healthy relationships in which one person has way more money than the other, but relationships with someone from a tribe that’s very far removed from your own mostly don’t work

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• I point this out because while many status markers are expensive, they tend to be tribally specific. Nelly and Tim McGraw have the same social status and belong to the same economic class, but are members of different tribes. Tim McGraw would look comically out of place if he tried to rock accessories that would work for Nelly and vice versa. Don’t try to be something you’re not; be the best possible version of what you actually are. No one likes a poseur.

  

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1. AKA Position, one of the four Normal Motivators. (I swear I’ll get to the Special Motivator soon).

2. Incidentally, this is why it’s so hard to get ahead socially if you start out behind; the human brain is neuroplastic under only certain conditions, one of them being adolescence, so socialization into a particular role happens before you even get to college, and it is not unlikely you have settled into the role you will occupy for life unless you make a conscious decision to change your social presentation in its entirety. It actually takes far less effort to change the totality of your life than it does to successfully make little tweaks to who you were in high school.

3. There are people on whom this method does not reliably work. Foreigners are one demographic that defies the high school sorting mechanism, because class structure does not map 1:1 between countries (figuring out the status of someone from a non-WEIRD country in whose language you are not conversationally fluent, especially, is advanced math). Some other groups with which this method fails are ex-cons and soldiers, both of whom have been forcibly resocialized, and actors, who have to be aware of the mechanics behind it as part of their job, and are thus able to intentionally subvert it.

4. Keep in mind these tells are clusters; no single tell should be considered reliable in isolation.

5. It is one of life’s great paradoxes that if you instead make a concerted effort to appear safe and trustworthy, you will lead women to perceive you as falling somewhere on the spectrum between “creepy” and “pepper spray.”

6. The exception to this rule is artists, who are drawn from all social classes. A romantic relationship between two artists, one upper-class and one middle or lower-middle-class, would not transcend class boundaries; at the end of the day both would be artists. Class distinctions are mostly socio-linguistic.