You don't have to participate.

Rewards for status game participation are paper thin and expiry is measured in minutes and hours.

“And the criminal, he on the other side of that but still he plays the game and if he plays it long enough, he even starts to talk about goin’ legit. But the outlaw, on the other hand, well we reject the game, society, ain't nothin’ organized about our crime because our crime is freeee-dom.”

Fargo, Season Four, Episode Four. (Credit: FX)

During my younger days, I was fiercely against the second Gulf War. Not against the USA or Great Britain, just against their invasion of Iraq.

This put me at loggerheads with quite a few people but that didn’t deter me. In fact, it made me even more entrenched in my position and I chose to become something of an evangelist on the subject.

So here’s me, at every BBQ, bar meetup, work meet up etc., waxing lyrical on the Middle Eastern situation in general and the Iraq war in particular. Then I realized something - Nobody gave a shit.

Not only did they not care about the war (other than it hitting them in the pocket through higher fuel prices) they especially didn’t care about my opinion and generally moved in the direction of away whenever I opened my mouth.

I’m a lot older now and I’m better at reading the room. I’m better at figuring out what people want to talk about and I’m much better at listening actively, letting them talk and enjoying what they have to say without angling to get in with my opinion to the detriment of the entire exchange.

I’ve stopped being a pain in the ass about social issues and while I have my opinions and plenty of them, I generally keep them to myself and a small group of friends who regularly annoy each other half to death in private. In public, I’m a listener and whenever possible, dispenser of self-deprecating anecdotes (I have lots).

This might seem par for the course. Young people are, thankfully, full of opinions on the world and many have plans to change it. In the cartoon of life, middle aged men like me have usually started reading the Daily Mail and complaining about immigrants. My checking out of the virtue signaling, changing-the-world routine could be regarded as nothing more than a combination of death being overdue and access to X.

So, what’s changed? Well, for starters, people of my age used to not have access to social media. And this matters, because people my age are often senior managers in positions that command significant influence over the younger cohorts of worker bees and middle management that are all trying to impress each other over on LinkedIn. Spending ten minutes on LinkedIn in will expose you to a world of virtue signaling that is visible from space. All, presumably, to advertise yourself and your general greatness to potential employers and/or your senior management team.

This is a status game. And status games are zero sum. In order for you to gain status, someone else must be denied it. We favor our own family members over others. We all think we have the best-looking spouse. We have our favorites in any group and defer to those even against the better arguments and suggestions of one of the “lower” members. We favor our own countrymen over others, even when the “foreigner” is clearly better. If this sounds petty, gritty and cruel, that’s because it is. It’s also how the human race has survived in groups for the last 200,000 years.

Participation

There are areas in our lives where participation is a must. Our families, our careers, our interpersonal relationships. I could also add learning, love and society.

Our participating in this sphere of our existence should be beneficial to us and should be also beneficial to the group we are participating in.

I would define good participation as a non-zero-sum. That is, everyone benefits. Some powerful examples of this are a learning group, a coaching relationship, a successful marriage.

The benefits of good participation compound. They accrue small gains, over time, that can lead to enormous gains in the long term. The stickiness of this participation benefit depends on the expiry of our contributions. Entering into long term relationships and participating fully within them to the benefit of all is a huge boon to ourselves and our group. Even shorter-term relationships can be mutually beneficial in this way, just without the long-term compounding.

Short term relationships where the game is zero-sum, no matter how sincere our intentions, are worthless in the long term and often of very little worth in the short term. Winning for yourself in the short term feels great, but the reward is usually small and the reputational damage will leave us unwelcome in future group opportunities.

Therefore, the maximum benefits of participation accrue where:

• The participation is long term.

• The game is non-zero-sum.

• The benefits are allowed to compound.

If we apply these criteria to our relationships and activities, we might see to our dismay, that a lot of our time is spent playing short-term, zero-sum games with short expiry contributions.

The type of people who participate in this way are obvious, in a very negative way, to those who don’t.

Yet these same players are also obvious, in a positive way, to their own potential tribe. This is not a tribe you want to be in, if you are in any way serious about building a valuable career or indeed, a happy life.

Public participation

Each of us gets a different personal “buzz” regarding our self-worth when we participate. We also get social status, especially when we do it overtly, loudly and evangelize our activity on social media.

We’ve all got friends and colleagues who are all over social media posting about the latest social cause. The environment and sustainability scores very highly at the moment, before that it was telling everyone how good you were at complying with covid regulations, before that it was climate change, before that it was the banking crisis. Why do we do this?

Because it makes us acceptable to the cohort of others who practice the same thing. We are accepted into a tribe of our peers. And this is usually where the trouble begins.

The Tribe and the Mob

Once we are accepted into any group we begin to play status games. We try to position ourselves, initially to receive the praise and trust of the group, then depending on our ambition, to elevate our status in the group to the point where we have disproportionate influence regarding what activities garner status and what activities take it away. We can become powerful. And with even moderate power, comes corruption, sycophancy and vanity. We can lose our sincerity, often abandoning the pure motivations that inspired us to participate in the first place. We can abandon our principled actions in favour of maintaining our status in our group. Critically, we stop thinking critically.

Anyone who criticizes the Tribe or the Tribe’s sacred cause gets vilified, attacked and often destroyed, as the Tribe morphs into a mob. And as several high-profile celebrities found out over the last couple of years, you do not want the mob coming for you.

Play social games, win social prizes.

The big problem with plastering your goodness all over social media is that unless you’re selling something through your posts, the rewards are paper thin. You are expending a huge amount of mental energy through posting, then re-reading your posts, then monitoring the amount of likes and replies, then (possibly) arguing with the naysayers who disagree with your point of view.

Most social media arguments are the equivalent of standing in a bar at 8pm on a Friday night arguing with a stranger about who’s favorite football team is better. Neither of you can possibly hope to convince the other that they are wrong and the next day the entire exchange has zero value, unless it was witnessed by your tribe, in which case you might get a slight bump in status from them, as will your opponent from theirs. And this is the key point; you are not getting any kudos from your opponents. You are only getting it from those who agree with you anyway. You are maintaining your status level only within your tribe, at a huge cost of mental energy and intellectual capacity. The rest of the world couldn’t care less.

Ask yourself, what are you getting out of this, really? Probably not much. Status games, as well as being zero sum, are notoriously short expiry on the individual level, especially for lower ranked individuals. For example, I’m very selective about who I follow on X. I either follow people I can learn something from, or people who I know I’ll disagree with, so that I don’t end up in an echo chamber. But the overall number is tiny. And from that tiny number of follows, I barely remember anything they’ve posted a few hours after I’ve read it. The exception to this is if the post has genuine value to me and will add to my own specific knowledge of something. Otherwise, the expiry of actual “good” posts is around three hours. Remember that the next time you’re trying to impress the world by “celebrating” something on LinkedIn.

Nobody will remember you for your Facebook profile. Nobody will care what you commented on X. And when you inevitably change your mind on that subject you defended so tirelessly, your tribe will either abandon you or turn on you. And you will find yourself in the best possible place – reality.

Reduce friction

The world of social media and the social politics of the workplace are friction generators. That is, they slow us down from getting things that we actually want to do, done.

There are some steps we can take to mitigate. We can delete all social apps from our phone, only engaging with them when we’re on our laptops. We can unfollow any account that is not teaching us something and reduce all non-family and friends follows to those necessary for organizing a part of our lives, like the 45 school and sports WhatsApp groups I’m in for just two children. And then we can mute all of those groups, just checking them twice a day. It’s 90% garbage anyway (no, I do not know where your son’s trainers are…)

It takes courage to not participate.

But if we truly want our time and peace back, we must stop participating in pointless status games. And by not participate, I mean just that. I do not mean take the opposite side of everyone else’s argument.

Not participating in the workplace can be difficult. I’ve witnessed more than one example of entirely inappropriate “encouragement” of teams and groups to get involved in social issues that they had no business being involved in at all. And once you agree to participate, extricating yourself from the situation can be even harder than saying no in the first place. You’ve joined the tribe at that stage and it’s a tribe you might not have interest in being a part of.

Not participating in the workplace can take a lot of courage, because unlike social media, your persona in the workplace is scrutinized even when you’re not participating. Your absence is noted and judged. And sometimes, you might feel that it’s easier to just go along.

My own experience of this is that the more I have been able to demonstrate that I am a critical thinker, willing to ask awkward questions and ultimately be independent in my personal decision making, the less I have been approached by the office Greta.

When the game becomes your life

There is always something to be shouting about. And we’ve all railed, at some stage, against something. To be angry about a perceived injustice is fine. Mindlessly banging a drum about that which you have no skin in the game is pointless and wasteful.

There is another extreme though, which can be even worse. This is the cult-ification of a cause or a way of life that precludes us from participating with the world as it really is, while demanding that the world aligns to our beliefs and practices. This is covered by Taleb (2016) in his excellent essay and I’m not going to rehash it here, but basically it is the insistence of a small minority that everyone switches to their belief system whenever they are present. Most of these systems are very much against something, not for, and anyone who doesn’t agree with them is to be excluded. If the exclusion of everyone else is not practical, they will exclude themselves and complain loudly.

It’s your choice

Look, I’m not telling that you should stop participating in low yield status games, I’m just pointing out that you can. And that its fine to opt out of having an opinion on everything and it’s also fine to keep the opinions you do have to yourself.

Think of all the work, all the achievements that you miss out on because you’re stuck in a constant virtue signaling game somewhere and you feel the need to keep it up.

Human beings are systems that are unique to the entire universe. We can achieve literally anything not precluded by the laws of physics given enough time, knowledge and wealth. Every moment we spend playing idiot status games on social media, at work, or in our social circles is depleting the one resource that we cannot get more of and that we will definitely run out of. There is very little reward for the amount of effort we put in. And our contributions expire in hours.

You do not have to participate.

Kevin Conway is an Executive and Leadership Coach. For coaching services, please see www.kevinconwaycoaching.com

References

Taleb, N. N. (2016). The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority. In N. N. Taleb, Skin in the Game.