QC

The status-seeking becomes emotional pica. Pica is when you eat things that aren't food because your body is unsuccessfully trying to deal with a nutrient deficiency. Emotional pica means there's an emotional need you're attempting to fulfill via a thing that won't work.

Once you start looking for this pattern it's everywhere, e.g. watching TV shows as emotional pica for fulfilling friendships. Modern status-seeking is emotional pica for... well, take your pick: people who love you, people who will support you, etc.

Status-seeking feels zero-sum because you're competing for a fixed pool of attention, but almost none of that attention is going towards building long-term sustainable committed relationships / communities, and it could be!

Simpler version of this dynamic is status-seeking in a dating pool where nobody knows how to commit to anyone else in a romantic relationship so everyone's just desperately trying to look as cool as possible to hook up with hotties.

The attention that's being competed over could be redirected towards people trying to figure out if they're genuinely compatible enough to commit to each other. There's still some competition but this game is much more cooperative.

Unfortunately, compatibility testing for long-term relationships requires a very different kind of skill, which perhaps many people have never learned. Under atomization we've lost the habit of relating to each other on the time scale of years.

Were we ever good at relating to each other over the timescale of years, or were we just overwhelmingly more likely to collocate around the same cluster of people over the timescale of years in the past?

Maybe both? I think mostly people didn't used to have a choice, and knew that. You relate to people differently if you're only ever gonna know the same 100 people or w/e, the stakes are different if you can't meaningfully exit.