Competing with the young in games of youth is not just hopeless, it’s dull. Since completing my research, I’ve realise these signs are symbols used to measure status in a game I’m no longer required to play. But we can decide which games we choose to play.Īs a 46-year-old, I’ve often felt self-conscious about my age and its various signs. It’s simply not possible to opt out of it. They’re built into our brains, part of how we experience reality. But our groups also compete with rival groups in status contests: corporation battles corporation, football team battles football team. Within these groups we strive for individual status, for acclaim from our co-players. In the developed world, we play political games, religious games, corporate games, sports games, cult games, legal games, fashion games, hobby games, video games, charity games, social media games, racial, gender and nationalist games. No matter where you might travel, from the premodern societies of Papua New Guinea to the skyscraper forests of Tokyo and Manhattan, you’ll find it: humans forming groups and playing for status. So we’re driven to seek connection and rank, to be accepted into groups and win status within them.

The more status we earned, the greater our capacity to thrive and produce thriving children. Back in the stone age, increased status meant access to better mates, more food and greater safety for ourselves and our offspring. But once inside any group, we’re rarely content to flop about on its lower rungs. As a tribal animal, our survival has always depended on our being accepted into a supportive community. We do so because it’s a solution our species has come upon to secure our own survival and reproduction.

We play games for status incessantly and automatically. The behaviour of racists, transphobes, conspiracy theorists, cult members, religious fundamentalists and online mobbers becomes much more explicable when you realise that humans are programmed by evolution to be obsessively interested in status, and that this obsession is powerful enough to overcome the will to achieve equality, truth or the sense of generous compassion for our rivals. To understand this is to understand why the human world can be so maddening, angry and irrational.

Play life the game