One of my goals taking the gap year has been to understand what it feels like to be on the edges of society, what I didn't expect is that this took longer than a year to fully emerge.

On a gap year, people give you unquestioned judgement to pursue anything you want for a year, but beyond a year, sometimes doubts on whether you are “productive” creeps in.

One thing I've been thinking about after the first year is how that perception affects certain interactions with people, and how the perception seems all about social status, which is something that works differently from zero-sum resources (food, water, shelter, money) in that it can be conjured out of thin air.

One example of this is Y Combinator, from Paul Graham (one of the co-founders):

A nontrivial part of the value of YC is that we give people a high-status brand under which to do low-status things. Being able to tell your parents “I got funded by YC” gives you cover to do things that don't scale.

And so “working out of the garage for years on your company idea” becomes a high status thing, rather than a low-status one.

When you see this, you start seeing signs elsewhere too. For example, Tyler Cowen's emergent ventures can be seen as another instance of this. After financial independence, many tech people adopt the label of being a Venture Capitalist. This bypasses the filter of productivity with generally small time and financial commitments each year. Business and profits can be examples of this, though I'm not sure how often this is the case.

In his article about status, Rob Henderson argued that Status works very much like food and water in that it is a primary motivator. We get sad (to the extent that even our immune system can get compromised) when we run low on it, and many of our behaviors are hardwired to seek them.

However, status is different from food and water in that you can create it out of nowhere.

In this way, status work less like a tangible resource, but more like a transmutable object. Understanding the pulse of this status drive can be valuable, such as demonstrated by the Y Combinator post. It gives people fuel to work on things that are more important than status.

One thing I think often about today's society is how the metric for status is not always aligned with what's creative, significant, and meaningful. There are status traps everywhere anchoring people in place. I think Y Combinator did more good than not in terms of meaning, and it did so in part with the ability to transmute status. From it, we can learn a bit about how to find our place in the world.

— Categorized under: #community, #psychology, #sociology