Chapter 1: Status is Everywhere
I fly a lot.
I don’t love it. I’ve never found it glamorous.
The preceding night is lost to restlessness. Passport panic gives way to weather watching and adaptor anxiety.
The day itself is disorienting and chaotic. Overpriced food, overcrowded spaces and overzealous security guards.
If you sleep well before a flight, I assume you’re guilty. If you arrive at your destination calm and well-rested, I have enough evidence to convict you.
Airports are bleak and luminescent affairs, wickedly contrived to amplify every sight and sound, to hum at an almost-unbearable frequency. Each stimuli competing to be louder and more abrasive, clamouring for your attention, driving you to despise your fellow passengers and resort to travel bags of M&Ms.
Even if you find a quiet corner, you can guarantee the final boarding call for the BA flight to Madrid, leaving from Gate 12, will promptly herd you back towards the pandemonium.
Essentially, you’re spending your day watching helicopters and tomato sauce.
The travel industry relies on status almost as much as this guy relies an in-flight Bloody Mary (umami thrives at high altitude, even if I don’t).
It’s their currency. It pulses through the very system.
Every element of your experience can be enhanced from the moment you leave home. Upgrade from Uber X to Uber Comfort; from the concourse to a lounge; economy class to premium economy to business to first; commercial to charter to private.
We’re raising a toast to our upcoming trip. To where we’ve been. To the rapid depletion of holiday funds and leftover exuberance.
We may tell ourselves we’re worth the expense. That we deserve refuge, space and calm amid the chaos. That, in isolation, an elevated experience is worth paying for.
Sometimes it is. Sometimes we do.
But the travel industry does not hinge on what we think of ourselves – it relies on what we want other people to think about us.
We’re investing in an experience with our friends. We’re signifying how much we care about our employees. We’re trying to keep up with our partner’s expectations.
And the travel industry understands and monetises it the mechanical precision.
The Bloody Mary is close to completion. A woman was just taken ill. A steward has asked if there is a Doctor on board.
When I was younger, I sought strong male leadership to fill the un-fillable void of my father leaving our family.
I grew up in a gynocracy, surrounded by sisters and female influences. I made friends with women more readily and found the desires of boys and men foreign to my own.
Unsurprisingly, the household decision-making process leaned firmly XX, and that included what we watched on television.
Viewing the flat screen as a surrogate parent, I had little agency over whether I watched. But command of the TV control was beyond my authority, so I rarely chose what we watched.
The result? By the time I left home, I’d watched a fuck ton of romantic comedies.
You know the score: Pretty but flawed characters meandering through a sea of misunderstandings and miscommunications until – after a 100-minute run time – suddenly, breathlessly, they realise they were meant for each other. Who knew.
This highly-reliable source material taught me that women can fake orgasms, never to drink juice from the carton, never to accept meatballs as payment, and the difference between the shrimp fork, salad fork and the dinner fork.
A youthful diet of meet cutes also notified me that adult professions were few and fixed. I had to choose between:
Writing editorials
Owning / working in a bookshop
Owning / working in a gallery
Writing screenplays
This is what adults did. These were the jobs. Rom coms told me so.
I write this as my flight is due to begin its descent. The Bloody Mary is close to completion. A woman was just taken ill. A steward has asked if there is a Doctor on board. I wrote this entire paragraph so I could share the scene below and reduce my anxiety levels. I’ve been waiting for this scene my entire life.
Status is vital (even on terra firma).
It’s the silent agreement, the moderated and logical and formalised impulse of the collective over the individual.
It organises people into roles, helping us gain a sense of belonging through association, and helping others by identifying who we are (it’s why our Doctor friend is now assessing the scene and I’m still seated).
Status incentivises us to work harder, follow the rules and work as a group. And working as a group is why we’ve endured to this day.
Cooperation evolved from scavenging and sharing the spoils some 2 million years ago, through the barter economy, child-rearing and language; through paper money and written contracts; through the arc of human ambition: Medicine, spaceflight, the internet and AI.
We adorn our leaders with titles: Professors and Captains. Judges and CEOs. PhDs and CPAs.
We identify institutional figureheads: Rabbis and Imams. Governors and Mayors. Chancellors and Principals.
We pass down designations through the generations: Dames and Empresses. Countesses and Viscountesses (it’s a thing).
We bow and salute and shake their hands, to acknowledge their rank. We embellish them with gowns and robes and hats and medals, to underline their standing.
And we don’t stop there.
We pay attention to someone’s readership or follower count. To the number of bottles released in a batch or the volume of sneakers in a collab.
We elevate restaurants through Michelin stars, movies through Oscars and musicians through Grammys. Remember, status is a ranking system, predicated on scarcity (few winners) and societal consensus (people voted).
There are everyday equivalents, where scarcity is relative and societal consensus is narrow.
Being old enough to drink. Looking young enough to be ID’d.
Status is what and where you eat. It’s where you grew up, where you went to school and where you call home now.
I know an artist that sells digital prints for £30k a pop. What’s the difference between one he prints and signs and one I could copy and paste? Status.
Brunch on a weekday? Status.
Golfing on the weekend? Status.
Polo, yachting and sailing just about whenever? Status.
Philanthropy? Guilt Status.
Status – like ‘privilege’ or ‘snowflake’ or ‘entitled’ – is a word that prompts a reaction.
It’s visceral. It’s warming, or it’s a warning.
Status is everywhere. We need it to survive. We’ve embraced it to prosper. But status, by design, argues what was is what should be. It’s a preservative.
And, while it has codified more good (round of applause for the Doctor on my flight; her name is Therese btw) than bad (watch out for anyone that calls themselves a ‘Supreme Leader’), it’s as universal and flawed a system as you’d expect considering who designed it: Us.
James Sandrini is a Strategist, Advisor + Investor in the experience economy and the services + technologies supporting it.