Status

And the sexiness of ideas

[day 10/30. Writing daily is becoming more and more frustrating honestly. It’s good that I’m forced to put something out there but I would have loved to spend more time on some of the ideas here and finding novel things to write about everyday is getting very challenging.]

I asked a good friend of mine who studies psychology if they too, crave status, because it’s something that has been on my mind a lot lately.

I told him them I really want a sexy job, thinking I was sounding a bit crazy.

They said that the longer they study, the more they’re uncertain about wanting to do talk therapy, something they seemed very passionate about when they started.

When I asked them why, they responded, smiling and clearly conflicted somewhere: “it’s not sexy enough”.

Sexiness

Sexiness probably has different meanings to different people. I guess I should start with my personal definition of sexiness.

It’s what “solving the Collatz Conjecture” is to being a math PhD student. What “Climbing mount Everest” is to mountaineering. It’s what “solving AGI” is to the field of machine learning.

To me: it’s the maladaptive daydream of breakthroughs, the obsession with results over process. It’s status, prestige & the massaging of the ego.

I was going to include a whole section on CEOs and the “urge to disrupt” but I’ll just leave you with this excellent video essay by Tantacrul which will do it more justice than I ever will.

Call it sexiness, call it the quest for status, call it the urge to disrupt if you want. It’s all the same bullshit in my brain.

My quest for status

Why define this? Because sometimes, I think about why I want certain things. And sometimes, the more I dig down, the more I realize, the answer is literally just that I crave the sexiness of the idea. Lifestyle advertising to myself.

I don’t know if some people just call this intrinsic motivation and move on with their lives. I might be suffering from too much self-reflection. Maybe when people experience this they just go “chase their dreams” or whatever.

I repressed this rat race quite successfully by just deciding that I was gonna be a teacher and just doing “good enough” in school all my life. I live in Belgium, which has a very strong social safety network and insanely progressive taxation. I also don’t want many things. I plan to donate almost all my disposable income to animal charities anyway. It was hard to find reasons to try. I’m gonna be fine no matter what I do. I feel like I’ve been raised in a culture where literally everyone settles for something “good enough”. I’ve not really been exposed to very ambitious people ever until very recently.

I cope that I want a high paying job so I can give more for the animals¹, but I think it’s mostly for my ego. I don’t generally like to draw a parallel with a show but I honestly think I’m being driven by the same thing that drove Walter White.

I wanna get so good at something that it makes me feel alive, so bad.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my drive to get a relationship immediately ended when I started chasing this idea of a sexy job. I guess I just need something to chase, even though I’ve also simultaneously realized that that’s completely futile and happiness is always found in the process and the small places. I contain multitudes once more.

Sadly, the quest-for-status bug seems to have bitten me and now I have to start incorporating something inside my mental model that a lot of people already gave a place in their brain definitively years ago.

It might sound stupid, but I think it’s a search for meaning really… ². The quest for esteem masquerading as self-actualization.³

I have doubts that moving to (and getting a job in) the bay area (which is the sexiest thing to me) will make me happy in the long run but I literally. Can’t. Stop. THINKING ABOUT IT...⁴

A lot of this is due to propaganda. These places are advertised all the time by virtue of soft-power, competition and self-reinforcing echo chambers.

A word of advice if you struggle with something similar: you are what you eat. Changing your media diet will almost certainly have a positive impact on this if you want to think about it less.

I don’t know how to end this article or what this even was. I guess what I want to say is that sometimes you may just want something because you think it’s sexy. I don’t know if other people struggle with this. If you do, DM me your life advice and don’t forget to like and subscribe or whatever.

1. I mean, I do care and will continue to donate my disposable income to effective animal charities

2. Camus concept of “philosophical suicide” comes to mind

3. maslow hierarchy of needs is bullshit bla bla

4. I would probably fucking HATE america!!! CARS!!!!