The Cost of Status
A few thoughts on the status trap of those born into wealth.
The following is an excerpt from Chapter 15: The Cost of Status, from my first book, Young Money: A Field Guide to Wealth and Purpose in Your Twenties (publication date: August 4, 2026!)
For the next few weeks, you can download the full chapter by pre-ordering your copy and adding your pre-order information below! Pre-orders are crucial for a book’s success, so I would be super grateful if you snagged your copy here:
I have a few friends who grew up wealthy in New York and Connecticut. Their parents work in finance, primarily. Many of these friends attended private schools that cost upwards of $60,000 per year. By the time they are 18, $700,000 has been invested in their education from kindergarten through high school.
Cool.
What are they supposed to do with their lives?
For a kid born into, say, the lower middle class from Wichita, Kansas, anything he does is upside. Graduating from college, any college, is an achievement. He could join the police force, teach college economics, start an aluminum processing business, write television scripts in Los Angeles, practice law, or manage hotels and be totally satisfied with his career. He could marry anyone and, as long as they loved and respected him, be totally content in his relationship.
The range of possible outcomes in which this individual ends up “successful” is wider than he can imagine.
But if you were born into immense wealth? Sure, you don’t really have to worry about money, but that money comes with a cost. From the day you can walk, the scope of acceptable paths for your life is narrow.
If you don’t attend Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, or Yale, no one will say, “Congrats!” They’ll wonder why you settled for Penn State. Oh, and just because you don’t need money doesn’t mean you’re allowed to now choose a profession that doesn’t pay well. Quite the contrary. It’s expected that you, and all of your high school classmates, land killer high-paying jobs to keep the gravy train going.
The fear of status regression keeps you up at night: making less money than your parents, or doing worse than your 0.01% peers, would make you a pariah. Or at least you tell yourself that. No one has more to lose than the kid born into status. And that pressure to keep up with other high-status peers is debilitating.
Palo Alto is one of the wealthiest cities in America. In 2008-2009 and 2014-2015, two Palo Alto high schools had a suicide rate that was four times higher than the rest of the nation. Why? Because their students were drowning in status anxiety.
Kids in these schools are expected to make straight As, ace the ACT, compete in the biology Olympiad, play the trombone, and dominate California water polo competitions. Just to keep up with their peers. It’s an unsustainable lifestyle.
The rich kid can’t take a risk in his life because, unlike most young people, he was born with something to lose. So, what does he do for work? Something both lucrative and safe to maintain the status he is used to. He works his ass off to take the right steps and go to the right schools, ensuring that he’ll be able to slide right into Kirkland & Ellis, Google, McKinsey, or Goldman. The same jobs that his less fortunate counterparts are chasing in their desperate attempt to gain status.
That’s the irony of status. The reward for winning the status game is another status game.
In his best-selling book Finite and Infinite Games, author James Carse defines finite games as “those played for the purpose of winning” and infinite games as “those played for the purpose of continuing to play.”
Chasing status is a quintessential finite game. No one wants status for status’ sake; it’s a comparison metric. You want more than your peers.
But the acquisition of status begets the desire for more status. Because satisfaction derived from obtaining status is so fleeting, the status chaser’s life is reduced to a series of pursuits in which the value of any given pursuit is dependent on the acquisition of your status.
- Jack
This blog is an excerpt from Chapter 15: The Cost of Status, from my first book, Young Money: A Field Guide to Wealth and Purpose in Your Twenties (publication date: August 4, 2026!)
For the next few weeks, you can download the full chapter by pre-ordering your copy and adding your pre-order information below! Pre-orders are crucial for a book’s success, so I would be super grateful if you snagged your copy here: