On the island of Pohnpei Micronesia, nearly 2000 km northeast of New Guinea, the nearest location of any size, yams are a big deal.
Quite literally. Men there used to spend much of their time tending their yams, trying to grow the biggest yam that year.
You see, presenting the biggest yam to the high chiefs during the ceremonial feasts was one of the only way for social advancement.
In the rainy season, food is plentiful, espcially breadfruits, which grow easily when it’s wet.
But from September to March, the rains go away, and it becomes the season of scarcity.
And yams? Yams play a oversized role in that.
According to Will Storr, author of The Status Game, the yam was a material symbol of men’s diligence. So men spend much of their time tending their yams.
“The man with the largest yam at a feast would be declared ‘Number One’ and praised by the chief for his generosity,” says Storr. “The men of Pohnpei would furiously compete for this position, raising around 50 yams a year in secret, remote, overgrown plots that they’d creep out of bed at two in the morning to tend to. A single yam could take 10 years to grow, reach more than 4m in length, weigh over 90kg and require 12 men to carry into the feast using a stretcher.”
Chalk part of that up to showmanship; you don’t actually need 12 men to carry a 90 kg (200 lb) anything, let along a root vegetable, but boy, does it look impressive.
And that’s the thing. They want impressive yams. They want it to be showy. Because if they have the biggest yam? They have status.
Ah, yes. Status. It’s something we all want.
We might look at a group of men carrying a giant (but, let’s be real here, not gargantuan) yam into a feast and singing the praise of the one who grew it as … quaint. It’s one of those cultural festivals that we can go see when we go to one of those remote places somewhere. We smile, nod in appreciation, then return to our regular life, where we drive our Porsche Cayenne to work, where we check the time on our Apple Watch Ultra and sneak glances at our Galaxy Z-Fold 5 to see how many likes our recent TikTok post has gotten.
Why? Because status. It’s not the same as growing a giant yam in secret for a decade to be declared Number One, but at the same time, it totally is. We play, says Storr, political games, religious games, corporate games, sports games, legal games, fashion games, hobby games, video games, charity games, social media games, racial, gender and nationalist games.
“Within these groups we strive for individual status, for acclaim from our co-players,” he says. “But our groups also compete with rival groups in status contests: corporation battles corporation, football team battles football team. When our teams win status, we do too. When they lose, so do we. These games form our identity.”
More than that, he says, we become the games we play. “They’re built into our brains, part of how we experience reality. It’s simply not possible to opt out of it. But we can decide which games we choose to play.”
Go to the gym? You are immediately part of some game there. Maybe it’s to have the biggest biceps or the nicest butt. Maybe it’s to be able to lift more than anyone else on the calf raise machine (I can press the stack…). At work, there are dozens if not hundreds of little games from where you can park to being able to use the executive washrooms to having the nicest hardhat or getting done your particular task quicker than all the others on your shift.
We are obsessed with status, and, to quote Storr again, “this obsession is powerful enough to overcome the will to achieve equality, truth or the sense of generous compassion for our rivals. We play games for status incessantly and automatically. We do so because it’s a solution our species has come upon to secure our own survival and reproduction…We’re driven to seek connection and rank, to be accepted into groups and win status within them. This is the game of human life.”
The pursuit of status is the source of many of society’s ills. Many of our own. But the pursuit of status is also key to many of society’s greatest accomplishments.
Remember the iPhone? According to Scott Forstall, who led the team that developed iOS, the iPhone came out of Steve Job’s interactions with a Microsoft executive.
According to Forstall, “[Steve] came back one time and the guy said that Microsoft had solved laptop computing or they were going to do tablet computing with pens. And he just shoved it in Steve’s face, the way they were going to rule the world with their new tablets and pens. Steve came in on Monday and there was a set of expletives and then it was like, ‘Let’s show them how it’s really done’.”
Science and scientific progress is driven by the pursuit of status. So is the drive to become better humans: to litter less, to be nicer to your fellow man (or woman.) At least, depending on your tribe. Some groups reward harming the environment (rolling coal, anyone) and hating your fellow man.
And that’s one of the secrets right there. We are constantly and always playing these status games, says Storr. The trick is to find games that lead to good outcomes, positive outcomes, helpful outcomes. To find ways to become better members of the human race, and not just some little corner of it that rewards hate, and intolerance and bad behavior.
And the other secret? Is to play the game, not to win, but to make progress in the right direction. Because nobody ever wins the status game. That’s not the point. The point is to figure out the right games to focus on and play those.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
