Status and Self-Worth

Status and Self-Worth | Generated by AI

Home 2026.07

Question: Do people’s appreciation, liking, and respect for me change based on my achievements and social status? And is that understandable?

Answer:

Yes, partly — and yes, it’s understandable. But it’s worth being precise about it, because the imprecise version of this belief quietly damages people.

What’s true: status and achievement are signals, and humans are signal-processing machines. When you had Fun Live at 30,000 users, strangers treated you differently than when you were an unknown dropout. Investors returned your messages faster. That’s not hypocrisy — it’s rational inference under uncertainty. People can’t read your character or capability directly, so they use proxies: track record, title, who vouches for you. Karpathy gets attention partly because “ex-Tesla, ex-OpenAI” compresses years of evidence into three words. This is why your own strategy of building in public works — your 8,000 notes and 400 posts are accumulated status, and they legitimately change how people receive you. It would be strange if they didn’t.

What’s also true, and matters more: the degree to which someone’s warmth tracks your status tells you which relationship you’re in. Roughly three tiers:

Transactional relationships (most professional contacts, most “network”): almost fully status-indexed. This is fine. Don’t expect otherwise, don’t be hurt by it. Your own playbook already treats these correctly — prune ruthlessly, invest only where it compounds.
Reputation-based respect (peers, community): tracks demonstrated work, which is status but the earned kind. This is the healthiest form — deepseek-style “let the work speak.”
Close relationships (wife, daughters, a handful of real friends): if these track your achievements, something is broken. Your wife married an engineer with a mortgage, not a unicorn founder. Your daughters don’t care about your GitHub stars.

The trap to avoid is a subtle inversion: concluding “since appreciation follows status, I am my status.” That’s where people go wrong — they start experiencing a failed project as a verdict on their worth, and success as proof of it. Both are miscalibrated. Status is an asset you build and deploy; it’s not a self. Yin Wang, whom you admire, is actually a good case study — he deliberately burned conventional status (quit PhD programs, criticized famous institutions) and kept a real audience anyway, because the work stood on its own.

So the practical stance: expect tier-1 and tier-2 relationships to fluctuate with your trajectory, use that as fuel rather than grievance, and protect tier-3 from ever being contaminated by it. When your startup eventually launches and either succeeds or fails, the people whose regard didn’t move — those are the ones you were building the financial buffer for anyway.

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