You should make sure you're *actually* high status before proclaiming yourself to be

Some thoughts about beverages, beards, and broken mufflers

This picture will make sense in a second

Indulge me for a second

I can grow pretty sweet beard. Like, an awesome one.

No gaps, no patches, nothing. 

Biology has screwed me over in many different ways: poor eyesight, a propensity to sprain my ankle, the reflex to swallow water while swimming, and the inability to stay focused if there's even the slightest disruption in my environment.

But beards – I got that one in the bag. 

In addition to the perfect distribution and coloration, I can grow it remarkably fast. My 5:00 shadow comes at 2:30 a.m.

I tend to be clean shaven because 1) Beards are itchy and 2) TSA – but trust me, on those rare occasions where I actually grow it out, it looks siiick.

Note your reaction. We’ll get back to that in a minute.

There was a huge Pepsi challenge a few days ago

The Pepsi folks thought they had a better product, and that everybody would agree to this fact. As it turns out, people still prefer the taste of Coke.

I'm not here to debate whether or not Coke or Pepsi is better. To be honest I try to stay away from, uh, soft drinks.¹

What is interesting is the way that the Pepsi marketing team is trying to understand why they lost.

In several of the interviews that I've watched, I've noticed a running theme: the Pepsi marketing team believes they are the preferred beverage of the “Elite”, the “High Status”, and the “prestigious”. 

I think this is a mistake.

The game theory of status signaling

I occasionally leave my house to discuss things with flesh people, and based on those conversations, I wanted to expand on a point I made in this previous post about overt status signaling.

There are two variables when it comes to having status:

1. Whether you are actually perceived to be impressive or not

2. Whether or not you decide to overtly signal your status

Scouring through the vast body of psychodynamic literature, I have compiled the game theory into the highly technical graph below: 

Believe it or not, this chart is integral to solving the Reimann hypothesis

Whether you are a high performer or not, you can see that it's better to downplay your achievements and save yourself the headache of negative perception. In Game Theory parlance this is known as strict domination — which I promise is not a BDSM term.

The top row is the point that I was making in opposition to Freddie de Boer in the previous post; Freddie was annoyed at the high achievers in his social circle who came across as LinkedIn humble braggers — but the truth is, this is still preferable to being an overt bragger. Unless you're 50 cent, it's very hard to come across as endearing while simultaneously bragging about your wealth and fame.

The bottom row, however, is the mistake the Pepsi challenge people are making.

Bringing us back to the beard thing

I'm assuming that most people reading the initial passages of this post had a reaction somewhere between confusion and “weird flex, but okay.”

That's because the vast majority of people don't really care about facial hair that much. Or, to put it in more technical terms, it's not a vector by which people determine their status.

Sure, some subcultures are really into facial hair. There's also certain subcultures where it is high status to put a spoiler on a 2006 Honda Civic with a muffler that is five times as loud as normal and emits a black miasma into the air.

But for the most part, people don't really care about that kind of stuff. If you started bragging about how loud your muffler was, how this made you elite, they would just roll their eyes and walk away. You’ll just be perceived as a delusional person (i.e. the lower right quadrant on the chart).

Takeaway

Again, this post is not about soft drinks (water gang for life). Nor is it some sort of admonition to the Pepsi marketing team. I myself know nothing about marketing (See: this blog).

This post is, however, about the arbitrary and subjective nature of status. Specifically, how it is an intersubjective reality — which is to say, people outside of your in-group need to perceive you as high status in order for it to be true.

So if a person goes around calling themselves high status, and they actually are, then it's just kind of annoying. But if people go around calling themselves high status, and everyone else judges their identity based on an entirely different set of metrics, then not only are they annoying, they are completely out of touch. 

More importantly, if you're saying that drinking Pepsi is something that only high status people do, then you are very strongly implying that anyone who doesn't drink Pepsi is low status.

And, I don't know, maybe that's actually a great way to market your product, buuut, it hasn't seemed like it's worked so far.

Thanks for reading

Also if anyone has any tips on how to stop snorting water while swimming laps that would be much appreciated thanks.

1. This is a lie. I occasionally indulge in a little bit of Fresca