The status game is built into people’s verbal and nonverbal behaviors toward one another.
A leap forward for me in forming a useful understanding of social reality/social truth was understanding that almost nobody has sat down and decided that they are going to operate according to the rules of social reality. As you said, it seems baked into how we work. What confused the heck out of me for a long time was how people could acknowledge moments where social reality seems to be “people pretending” (like at career fairs) and still claim that another realm of social reality was “actually the way things are”.
The first rule of the social reality club is: you don’t talk about the social reality club. But sometimes it simply becomes too obvious. In such case, you minimize damage by admitting that yes, this very narrowly defined situation is an artificial social reality, but nothing else.
But what is the alternative? Imagine an average person admitting that everything around them is social games. How are they going to continue living their life?
A leap forward for me in forming a useful understanding of social reality/social truth was understanding that almost nobody has sat down and decided that they are going to operate according to the rules of social reality. As you said, it seems baked into how we work. What confused the heck out of me for a long time was how people could acknowledge moments where social reality seems to be “people pretending” (like at career fairs) and still claim that another realm of social reality was “actually the way things are”.
The first rule of the social reality club is: you don’t talk about the social reality club. But sometimes it simply becomes too obvious. In such case, you minimize damage by admitting that yes, this very narrowly defined situation is an artificial social reality, but nothing else.
But what is the alternative? Imagine an average person admitting that everything around them is social games. How are they going to continue living their life?
They could either become depressed, become more okay with social games, or hold some more nuanced view—like some social games are good but not all.