Faking a Private Jet, and the Cost of Status

“An old friend of mine, a journalist, once said that paradise on earth was to work all day alone in anticipation of an evening in interesting company.” - Ian McEwan (Machines Like Me)

The Cost of Status: Palo Alto is one of the wealthiest cities in America. In 2008-2009 and 2014-2015, two Palo Alto high schools had a suicide rate that was four times higher than the rest of the nation. Why? Because their students were drowning in status anxiety. Kids in these schools are expected to make straight As, ace the ACT, compete in the biology Olympiad, play the trombone, and dominate California water polo competitions. Just to keep up with their peers. It’s an unsustainable lifestyle. The rich kid can’t take a risk in his life because, unlike most young people, he was born with something to lose. So, what does he do for work? Something both lucrative and safe to maintain the status he is used to. He works his ass off to take the right steps and go to the right schools, ensuring that he’ll be able to slide right into Kirkland & Ellis, Google, McKinsey, or Goldman. The same jobs that his less fortunate counterparts are chasing in their desperate attempt to gain status.

The Ones Who Got Away: A boy and a girl meet on a street corner one spring morning in Tokyo. Both are single and young, in their early twenties. They’re strangers, but when they meet, there’s an obvious spark, an unmistakable sense of attraction between them. So they sit on a park bench for hours, talking, holding hands. It is a perfect moment. Even though they haven’t known each other for long, they somehow instinctively realize, with complete certainty, that this is the person they are meant to be with. But then a small doubt creeps in. It feels too easy to be true. What if they’re just imagining it? So they devise a test — if they walk away from each other now, and if this chemistry is truly real, they will find each other again. They say goodbye. One walks west, the other walks east. They never meet again. Instead of maximizing, Simon argues that humans must satisfice. The word is his own coinage, combining “satisfy” and “suffice”. It means that you consider a limited set of options, and you pick the one that is best among them. It may not be perfect, but it is good enough.

Faking a Private Jet to Sell an Online Course: Sitting on a white leather recliner on my private jet, I needed to decide how many millions of dollars to give myself, a process that was less about thinking and more about how many times to hit random number keys on my keyboard. I watched 404 Media’s revenue graph go up and to the right. I clicked record on my camera, wanting to show my followers how hard I work, even when I’m getting shuttled off to exotic locations. “We’re here on the PJ, off to Ibiza. Got the passport, got the prosecco. We’re hustling. 404media.co,” I say. “You want to get rich? Publish journalism on the internet. I just published something.”

https://www.404media.co/how-i-bought-a-private-jet-by-selling-10-subscriptions-to-404-media