A lot of men are very insecure about themselves, which manifests itself in constant status jockeying. Boys, and men, are pretty good at inventing arbitrary status hierarchies. Among high school kids, status is often conferred by how expensive your clothes are, which is a ludicrous metric as it is primarily dependent on how much money one’s parents make and thus has little to do with the summary of the life achievements of Joe Douche Jr. In college, there are subgroups in which drinking is all the rage and people boast about how many quantities of X they can consume without passing out. Obviously, in the working life, people status jockey with their job titles, salary, or number of direct reports.

There is another metric, which you could call the Blue-Pill Conformance Index (BPCI). To score high on this metric, you need to have the following: a house, a wife and, ideally, more than one kid. The house could be heavily mortgaged, but that is irrelevant for the BPCI. Neither does it matter if the wife is hot or if the children are cute, in the case of daughters, or smart, in the case of sons. Blue-Pillers are just supposed to have them.

I was not really aware that this kind of lame one-upmanship even exists, but it does. I first encountered this when I had to work with some guy who had nominally a lot more years of experience than me, but in terms of actual skill was pretty much a perennial beginner. Completely arbitrarily, he dropped that he has a wife and a few kids at home, and that he can’t fully focus on work because of his family. (As if “putting in the effort” was the issue. The guy just wasn’t smart enough for his job.)

Sometimes I even end up in comical situations, which are due to me looking pretty young for my age. People still think I’m in my late 20s and sometimes people even ask me if I’m a student. Anyway, the key aspect is that I sometimes bump into people who believe that they are much older than I am, even though we are at approximately the same age. One dude pulled out the committed-father-and-provider” card and I was tempted to point out that I’m married, too. I kept mum, though, because I don’t think he would have taken it well had I revealed that my wife could, age-wise, be his wife’s daughter.

As a teenager and adolescent I had a few friends and acquaintances who were apparently eager to one-up me. Back then I didn’t care about women. Yet, those losers firmly believed that having any woman was better than having no woman at all. That someone could deliberately not engage with women was beyond their level of comprehension. I recall one of those guys calling me up one day — back then people still called on the phone — and asking me how I was doing. He quickly got to the point and wanted to know if I had a girlfriend. I told him that I’m not looking. I could almost hear his chest swelling as he said, “But I have a girlfriend now!” Those guys weren’t Chads and didn’t have much going for them. They didn’t have much success with women at all, and some got the occasional fatty. Yet, they had now a higher score on the BPCI than me, and thus felt superior.

As pathetic as this kind of status-jockeying may be, it is also quite transparent. Of course, the best move is to not play. My recommendation is to just pretend to be impressed. Tell them it’s great that they’re married and have kids, and ignore that their wife is ugly and their kids will have a rough life ahead of themselves. Just tell them that you’re happy for them. Normally, you don’t need to reveal anything about yourself. Let them walk away feeling superior. Above all, learn to just not give a damn because if your self-worth depends on the approval of others you won’t ever be truly content.

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