Status

Jonathan Haidt provides a thoughtful summary of recent psychological findings verifying humanity's ancient insights about human happiness in his book 'The Happiness Hypothesis'. On the importance of status, he quotes the following survey results: When asked 'would you prefer if you made 90 000 and your colleagues 70 000, or if you made 100 000, but your colleagues earn 150 000 instead', the majority of people prefer having less money, but more status instead. Yet, when the same people are asked about vacation, such as 'you have two weeks of vacation, whereas your colleagues only one, versus you have 4 weeks versus your colleagues have 6 weeks', the majority chooses the cooperative option instead.

Status is a zero sum game, the more the others have, the more your own situation gets diminished. You gain with the very intention to leave your neighbor out in the dust. We have gathered these insights for thousands of years, nothing really has change since. The task of spirituality at hand is to live the cooperative solution, to feel it in your bones that the dog-eat-dog world is nothing but a waste of time. No insight or book can help you with that, you have to feel it as well. Only your unique spiritual path can get you to this advanced stage. However, even we spiritual path travelers have our ego traps. What  if your spiritual quest is nothing but another attempt to gain status, wrapped in spiritual cloth. The ego is ingenious, so please watch out for a quest for status in disguise.