26 August

The most common health advice for people is to exercise, eat well, don’t smoke or drink. But check this. Research shows that people at the lowest rungs of an organisation, with the lowest status, are 4 times more likely to die than those of higher status in the organisation. Even if they have the same health behaviours (what they eat, whether they smoke etc). And it’s even more granular. Amongst those at the top end, a deputy CEO for example is more likely to die than the CEO, even if s/he has the same health behaviours. Nothing is more important to humans than social status, and not just in the workplace. Everywhere. ‘Fitting in.’ It shapes us as deeply physically as mentally. Mean Girls is one of the most important social movements (not just a movie) of recent times, for mine. It targets this explicitly. It includes mothers as well as daughters, recognising these behaviours cross generations. Men are exactly the same, they have their own status games. We never leave high school. The reason everybody gave up fighting Covid was because it became a low status thing to do. Nobody else is doing it, and that’s the number one guiding principle for most people in their lives. What everybody else is doing. If everybody else is wearing a puffy jacket, we wear puffy jackets. If nobody is wearing a mask, we won’t wear a mask. We never leave high school. Similarly EVs are not yet high status, so the old petrol/diesel status hierarchy still prevails. It has absolutely nothing to do with the relative merits of anything. Status kills, much faster than anything else.