I was standing at the gate at Brisbane last week, waiting to board a flight to Sydney, when I noticed the way folks bristled at the announcement: "We will now begin boarding Group One." Half the crowd leaned forward in envy, craning their necks to see who had the sacred blessing. A few adjusted their watches, as if reminding themselves they, too, belonged somewhere important. Others fidgeted, muttering about overhead space or fairness. It struck me that this little ritual, played out at every airport in every corner of the world, has become the truest parable of our age. We are obsessed with status, and we’ve built our lives around proving we’re in Boarding Group One.
Airports are temples of hierarchy, to the point that the pecking orders are broadcast over the intercom. Some people will never get out of Group Five, no matter how hard they work. Some seem permanently enshrined in Group One, gliding on a cloud of priority tags and lounge access. And the rest of us? We hover, hustling for upgrades, praying for a new promotion or a higher tier of credit card that will bump us forward a row or two.
In theory, our world is supposed to be allergic to these rituals. We claim to be egalitarians, believers in merit - champions of the ordinary person. But watch the faces at Gate 32 when Group One is called, and you’ll see how false those democratic ideals turn out to be. Status is the air we breathe. You can see it in the shoes we wear, the brands we flex, the followers we count, the schools our children attend. Boarding Group One ties it all together: the desire to be seen, the fear of being left behind, the gnawing suspicion that life is an exclusive club and the velvet rope is always just ahead.
To say that status-seeking is shallow, I think misses the point. Status is primal. It shapes marriages, careers, neighborhoods, even our sense of self. I’ve seen friends measure their worth by how quickly they get a reply from someone "important." I’ve seen people buy cars they can’t afford, not for the car itself - for the nod of recognition it might elicit from total strangers. I’ve done it too, in smaller ways; posting something on social media and checking compulsively for likes, pretending it was just about sharing a thought when it was really about affirmation. Who hasn’t felt that secret thrill when their status gets recognized?
For all we tell ourselves about merit, mobility and movement, status is the central organizing principle of modern life. We don’t have religion in the same way anymore. We don’t have community bonds (and to hell with our neighbours). What we have instead is a finely tuned antenna for where we rank. It’s an obsession that warps institutions; Universities, corporations, even churches - they’re all run as elaborate machines for conferring and distributing status. That $100,000 diploma has nothing to do with education and everything to do with the credential that puts you in a different boarding group for the rest of your career. Etc.
Maybe status competition drives progress.
Maybe, without it, we wouldn’t have ambition, innovation, or excellence.
Maybe.
But when I watch the petty indignities of the boarding process - the elbowing forward, the resentment, the humiliation of the stragglers - I wonder if we’ve confused ambition with vanity. There is, there has to be a difference between striving to create something valuable and striving to sit in a slightly more comfortable chair. Much of what we call "achievement" is just status laundering. A promotion might mean more responsibility, but often it mostly means a new title to flash at cocktail parties - or more likely, as a humblebrag on LinkedIn. An Ivy League acceptance letter might open opportunities, but it functions more as a lifelong badge that tells everyone you were chosen.
I think the part that unsettles me is how status anxiety has crept into corners of life where it doesn’t belong. Friendships that should be rooted in affection get poisoned by comparison. Parenting is an arms race of enrichment activities, all to prove your child is in a higher group. Even leisure isn’t immune. I’ve sat at dinner tables where ordering the "right" bottle of wine was more about showing discernment than enjoying the taste of the damn thing. It makes me wonder: what would life look like if we stopped boarding by group entirely? If the airline called out, "Everyone at once," would we really descend into chaos, or would something like order figure itself out? Maybe the whole system depends on our willingness to submit to hierarchies that humiliate us.
I don’t want to pretend I have a neat solution. I can’t tell you to renounce status and expect you to listen; if I’m being brutally honest, I wouldn’t follow that advice. We all like the way it feels to get called first and I include myself in that indictment. But I can tell you this: the way we let status rule our lives is making us miserable. It pits us against each other in a zero-sum game where even the winners can’t relax, because there’s always another rung, another group, another measure. If you’re in Group Two, you want to be in Group One. If you’re in Group One, you yearn for a private jet. There’s no end to it.
I keep thinking about that moment at the gate, when the announcement goes out and the chosen few rise to their feet. It’s such a tiny thing, so ordinary, so banal. But that banality is the absolute truth of our culture: we’ve made status the organizing drama of daily life. And the rest of us sit there, clutching our boarding passes, hoping against hope that one day, somehow, our name will be called first.