Choosing The Right Pond

Reflections On The Human Need For Status

You’re probably reading this on the first day of Autumn 2024. The weather has taken a turn to the cooler here in Altadena almost as if on cue. Last night on my evening walk, I passed a house where a young mother and her daughter were plotting out where each of the Halloween decorations would go. Soon jokes about pumpkin-spice everything will appear on my Facebook feed, and of course the leaves will begin to fall.

As the weather leans toward winter, baseball builds toward the playoff season. And so does our politics enter into the final winner-takes-all sprint for the trophy. All of this has me thinking a lot about the human drive for status.

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This particular summer also brought us the Olympics. If I asked you to name three Gold Medal winners, you could probably do it easily. But naming three bronze-medal winners would send you to your phone for some research.

We know who the fastest man on Earth is, don’t we? But somewhere the third fastest man is working out a modestly lucrative endorsement deal with the third most popular sports-wear company. And he’ll be the envy of those who finished 7th or 8th and won’t ever be able to quit their days jobs.

But for Noah Lyles, being third-best would be a living hell.

It’s always struck me as maximally ironic that the former president is named Trump. The word itself means to beat the competition. How often I use the word generically in conversation, and just for a second when I hear myself say it, I think of Donald Trump.

How odd. He didn’t choose that name for himself, but no other could describe him better. Most all of the trouble he gets himself into, is rooted in his refusal ever to admit that he was wrong about something. That he made a mistake. That anybody could be better than him at whatever he does.

The candidates of both political gangs, up and down the ticket, are competing not just for government offices but also for status. To rank as superior to ‘those people’, and among the most dominant within their own team.

Democrats see themselves as more open-minded, more scientific, more future-focused, concerned about big issues like climate change and inclusion. Republicans see themselves as steadier, more common-sensible, more law-abiding. Attuned to the traditional values that have served us well. Both sides feel that their plans for the country will result in better people.

But the endless online debate between red and blue voters, is more about the cheap status of winning the moment’s argument, than about being better people. This makes all involved into worse people.

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The drive for elevated stature is cooked into humans. We’re social primates. And we all live within some sort of dominance hierarchy. Probably several of them, if we think about family, neighborhood, workplace, and hobby-groups. At any one time, all of us are aware of how we stack up in comparison to everybody else. We’ll find ourselves competing for attention even if we are trying consciously not to compete.

Years ago, in an online discussion group about an upcoming folk-music conference, I suggested that we just be honest, and admit that we were all competing for gigs and other opportunities. Oh, the blow-back I caught! In that world, competition is seen as a bad thing. So for the next three days, the folkies in that group told stories about how cooperative they were. Each tale topped by another. They were actually competing for the title of least competitive.

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The human desire to rise up in the hierarchy will never go away. The contests will continue and there will always be honors awarded, fame and fortune granted, and elections won and lost.

But nobody needs to win gold medals in Paris or gold statues in Hollywood. Or be president of the United States.

What we DO need is to feel as if we matter. That’s natural, and there’s no sense in denying it or feeling bad about it. At root, STATUS is just a measure of how much any individual matters in the eyes of a group.

Trump’s strength isn’t in his show-off wealth or constant bragging. I think many of his voters wish he’d cool it with all of that alpha-ape behavior. His strength is that he has returned to working class people, a sense of their importance in the American tribe.

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I’ve lived on the outskirts of Los Angeles for most of my life, and L.A’s most notable product is fame. I can’t remember a time when nobody I knew wanted to be famous. But I can remember phases of my life where almost all of my friends did. Myself included.

My generation grew up in an era where, if something meant anything, it was on the radio, or in the movies or on TV. The basic human desire for a reasonable amount of attention and respect was being stretched and distorted by mass media. It’s that much worse today. It’s been drilled into us all of our lives, that celebrities are more important than non-celebrities.

The first project I remember entering into willingly was with my grade-school best friend, Bob. We formed ‘a band’, and called ourselves ‘The Kicks’. We drew logos on our notebooks and wore matching jackets and spent our lawn-mowing money on department store instruments. Bob could play his beginner’s guitar a little, and I could finger a melody on the Magnus chord organ that I’d bought at Woolworths. But it wasn’t that we were dying to play and sing. We had just seen how the girls reacted to The Beatles and we wanted some of that.

We were Catholic school kids in a neighborhood full of public-school kids. We had to wear dopey school uniforms while they had all the latest clothes. They thought we were weird, and we thought they were cool. We figured that if we played in a band we’d be cool too. It wasn’t about music. It was about status. In our fantasies, we may have talked about being rich and famous. But what we really wanted was to be popular in our own neighborhood.

Of course it never amounted to anything. We were 10 years old.

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It’s only coincidental that much later I discovered that I actually did have musical talent. My first real guitar at 20 years old, immediately yielded a few rudimentary songs. But the L.A. singer-songwriter thing had come and gone by that time. Record companies were looking for MTV-style rock bands.

I made the effort anyway, figuring that I could adapt. But my forays into the Hollywood Hills of the eighties only turned me into a hollow-eyed drug casualty.

I wound up painting houses in obscurity, married with young kids. Still in my spare time, I kept writing songs.

Then I started hosting shows, creating gigs for myself and others, and eventually I gained a degree of respect among my peers. Gradually I came to understand that I didn’t need to be a household name, but that I did still need some smaller degree of recognition.

This brings us to the picture at the top of this column. The idea of a little fish in a big pond, versus a big fish in a little pond.

The trick, it seems to me, is to not be either of those fish. The trick is to find the right-sized pond. And then to figure out what sized fish you would actually like to be.

For me, being locally known has usually been enough. While putting on small shows and playing small gigs, I met Alexia, and we developed our Backyard Invasion model that has seen us do over 80 events in people’s backyards all over SoCal. Here I am on September 14, before an audience of 55, with two of my favorite human beings, making music that we love.

Apparently, this is how big a fish I am and how big my pond is.

You are one of a few hundred humans that will read this post. You reading this gives me another moderate helping of status. (you’ve seen me struggle with wanting more)

When you finish, here on this first day of Autumn, you will probably go do something with some number of people whose lives are happily linked to yours. They don’t look at you and wonder how you stack up compared to all of their other possible options. They’re just glad to know you.

Are they in your world? Or are you in theirs? Both. And neither. We’re all major players in the lives of a few folks, and barely in the peripheral vision of hundreds of others.

And that’s how it is for all except the few who are seized by the hands of mass media and thrust into national or international awareness.

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Look, I once had a YouTube channel, and was cranking out videos that averaged - for a time - 50,000 views each. And you know what? It didn’t feel like anything. It was an abstraction. I had just enough ‘fame’ to realize that the human brain isn’t equipped to process that much acclaim from strangers. We’re wired to be known and appreciated by somewhere between 50 and 200 people. About the same number of faces and names that our brains can keep matched to one another.

In this TikTok/Instagram age, anybody can go viral at any time. For almost any reason. People who’ve merely said some silly catchy thing on a 15-second video, suddenly turn up on the late-night chat shows. This has added a roulette-wheel quality to the human desire to be seen and valued. Imagine how many young people are making TikToks alone every day, hoping to win big at the status table.

In such times, it pays to remember that we’re built for the village. You probably already have enough status. And if not, it’s probably because you’ve been looking in the wrong places.

So, as Autumn’s contests reach their conclusion, let’s all try our best to see the people around us more clearly. To understand their value to us, and our value to them. To let that understanding settle us, and give us the small sturdy community that we deserve.

I’m guessing that some of you have stories about finding your pond, and expanding - or perhaps contracting - until you fit comfortably. The comment section below is for you.

Thanks for reading my thoughts. I look forward to reading yours. -Dave