On Respect, Hierarchies, and Happiness

A fundamental human trait is a desire for respect. Gaining respect is such a natural thing to do that most of us seek it out wherever it can be had. But maximizing respect doesn't correlate with maximizing happiness. There will be overlap, but ultimately we have to choose, and this choice will often shape life's most significant decisions.

We all basically know what respect means, but for the sake of precision, respect means to show deference or esteem. We can respect others, and we can respect ourselves. We crave respect from ourselves and others, although the relative balance will vary by individual. Respect for ourselves allows us to live with ourselves, and respect for others is the basis for society because respect enables cooperation. Societies can exist only because we cooperate. In this light, respect is foundational to humanity as we know it.

On the macro level, society depends on cooperation to form a government, found a religion, or accomplish anything beyond the scope of a single individual's abilities. To cooperate on such scales, we rely on respect and the hierarchies that derive from relationships based on respect. Whether it is a natural law or just humanity's failure to find a better way, we form hierarchies because they facilitate cooperation, especially large-scale cooperation. Religions (Allah, Jesus, the disciples, the Pope, Krishna, the Buddha), governments (President, Prime Minister, General Secretary, General), and companies (CEO, Board of Directors) are just a few of the most common examples of large-scale cooperation organized into a hierarchy.

A notable feature of hierarchies is that they have limited space at the top. And yet, across most hierarchies, we notice that there are individuals that seek out lowly roles in the hierarchy. Why? Because even individuals at the bottom of the hierarchy can accept their lowly position and function as a part of the whole for the good of the hierarchy if the hierarchy fosters respect for those individuals. Whether it is the low-paid intern, the political volunteer, or the back seat parishioner, people show up and contribute because doing so gets them respect, maybe from others, maybe from themselves, but respect nonetheless. Respect could come externally from the individual working for a prestigious organization or internally from working on a project of personal interest, or maybe the individual chooses to take the role because the organization pays them the highest wage for their time.

Despite the impression Maslow's Hierarchy may give, most hierarchies are dynamic, ever-changing with the hierarchical organization's goals. For example, a political party may change as a new social issue arises, or a company hierarchy may change in light of new technology or a changing market. Given the dynamic nature of hierarchies, individuals realize that where they are now in the hierarchy is not where they will always be. Accordingly, we instinctually look for ways to move up because the higher we go, the more respect we get.

Now that we know how hierarchies are created and why they exist, it is essential to understand that there are multiple kinds of hierarchies. So far, we have only focused on external hierarchies, but hierarchies come in two forms, external and internal. External hierarchies are all hierarchies other than our own and include capitalist enterprises, governments, and religions. External hierarchies can be important, like a government, or relatively unimportant, like a homeowners' association. External hierarchies also can be small, such as a football team, or large, like the U.S. Army. Generally, the larger the hierarchy, the more respect conferred, both because there are more individuals to earn respect from and because achievement means competing with and triumphing over more people as one climbs higher in the hierarchy.

The biggest hierarchy, which exists in all parts of the world for every human alive, is the dating pool. There isn't a formula for how we arrange our dating pool hierarchy. Still, we know from anecdotal evidence that it is some combination of physical attractiveness, youth, power, money, intelligence, and personality. Other hierarchical arrangements are more opaque. Regardless of whether we are aware of how a hierarchy is arranged or how to move up in a hierarchy, we subtly feel where we are and desire an elevated position in the hierarchy, embracing the outlook that if some respect is good, more respect is better. Obtaining more respect by climbing a hierarchy or expanding one we've apexed is great in a vacuum. The problem is that we often seek elevation in all of the hierarchies we belong to, even the ones that aren't part of our long-term goals and that don't contribute to our long-term happiness. In this sense, respect is similar to money, we can't ever seem to get enough of it, and it doesn't matter where it comes from.

There is only one internal hierarchy, and we all participate in it at all times. Here we are constantly evaluating and re-evaluating ourselves with each evaluation moving the needle on how much we respect ourselves. Every decision we make, emotion we express, everything we eat, and basically everything we do moves us up and down within our hierarchy. Internal hierarchies are remarkably unique to each of us, so it is hard to generalize what makes us move up and down in our hierarchy, but the gist is that the better we feel about ourselves, the higher we are in the hierarchy. The worse we feel about ourselves, the lower we are in the hierarchy. An internal hierarchy sounds counterintuitive because at all times, we are both the top and bottom (and every rung in between) of the hierarchy. Yet, we all recognize that we have days where we perform our best and are proud of the things we said and did and days where the opposite is true. In a sense, our internal hierarchy is our life-long competition with ourselves, where we measure our current state against our slate of past experiences. Characterizing our internal hierarchy in this way may seem silly. Still, it provides a framework within which we can organize our experiences so that they are helpful to us.

We may recall a day when we accomplished a big project, read a remarkable book, and boldly landed that first kiss as a day we basically walked on the clouds and fully respected ourselves. We may also recall a day when we said something dumb in front of a crowd, wore mismatched shoes or caved to addiction or craving as a day we didn't feel fondly about ourselves. The same person lived both days, and we can't change the past, so we don't recall these memories to beat ourselves up (although that sometimes happens too), but by cataloging the days, we can get a better sense of what made the former experience so much better than the latter and use that to create more days that more closely resemble the former. This is important because even though we may not consciously realize it, we inherently know what we are capable of, what makes us happy, and who we want to be, and living beneath any of these is a dredge on our soul. It weighs us down and foments internal discontent. Just as we all long to climb the external hierarchies we are part of, we also long to climb our internal hierarchy and gain the self-respect that derives from elevation in our internal hierarchy.

Of course, we all want respect, both from external sources and from our core selves. Respect is a vital component of the human experience. It is what enables us to cooperate on a scale no other creature can, and it at least in part defines the human experience. No matter how contrarian we may consider ourselves or how hard we try to view ourselves as immune from the thoughts and opinions of others, we can never snuff respect out of our lives because our internal hierarchies are invincible, and our external hierarchies are pervasive. But, just because we can't extricate ourselves from respect doesn't mean we can't control it. The respect we experience is a result of the choices we make.

We can't opt out of our internal hierarchy, but we choose at least some of our external hierarchies. As hard as we may try, we can't avoid the dating pool, but we can limit our participation. We also can choose which company we work for, where we go to school, who are friends are, and to some extent, even which country we live in. Even in this limited set of external hierarchies, we must acknowledge that no one can be at the top of all of them. Our resources and time are too little for that. So we have to choose. We must choose which external hierarchies to compete in and which to exit if we can or ignore if we can't.

Because seeking respect is such an elemental human trait, we naturally seek respect using what Daniel Kahneman would call System 1 thinking, or thinking that is fast and effortless because it indulges our instincts. System 2 thinking is slower, methodical, and more logical. To make the most of our time and effort, we must remove seeking respect from our System 1 thinking and place it in our System 2 thinking. Getting consistent at this will take practice and lots of correction. It may even involve significant life changes. But the reward is more control over our lives. And with this control, we can pursue the respect that will make us happier and lead us to live our best lives.

So what would it look like to evaluate a hierarchy through System 2 thinking? It depends on what kind of hierarchy we are considering. We can't consider whether to participate in our internal hierarchy because we are an active member of it, whether we want to be or not. When it comes to our internal hierarchy, we can only acknowledge its inevitability. Hence, in evaluating our internal hierarchy, our focus is on how to elevate our trajectory within the hierarchy.

As for our external hierarchies, we should determine whether we can opt out and, if we can, the degree to which we should participate. Evaluating an external hierarchy means evaluating what is to be gained by participating in the hierarchy, what level of achievement we are likely to attain against the amount of effort required for that achievement, the potential upside of participating in the hierarchy, and most importantly, how participating in the hierarchy will affect our evaluation of where we fall in our hierarchy. If, on balance, after determining through these participatory explorations that we should participate in an external hierarchy, then we must decide on our optimal level within the external hierarchy. Ultimately, our internal hierarchy will guide our external hierarchies. Some examples may be helpful.

Alyssa is a young, single, unfulfilled professional. Alyssa has achieved before she even knew what achievement was by getting good grades, getting into good schools, and attaining a professional career as a private practice doctor that confers traditional status and an affluent lifestyle. Both the hours she's devoted to achieving and the number of unique achievements are too numerous to count. And yet, she feels unfulfilled. Fulfillment can derive from many sources, but assuming Alyssa's lack of satisfaction can be primarily traced to her professional life, then the chances are that she has been focused on the wrong hierarchies. Alyssa's talents have enabled her to participate in lots of optional external hierarchies - grades, school, profession, and employer (to name a few), and by operating on System 1 thinking, Alessa has given into her natural instinct to participate in the most traditionally prestigious hierarchies and then to achieve in each of these hierarchies because with each achievement came greater respect. But, because Alyssa didn't first filter the choice as to whether or not to participate in these hierarchies through her System 2 thinking, she has expended a great deal of effort and achieved a suboptimal result on her internal hierarchy, even if her external scorecard appears to lack a blemish.

There's no need to overanalyze where Alyssa went wrong. Whatever she did to get to her position today is done and cannot be changed. Those experiences may contain lessons that can guide Alyssa's path to a more fulfilling one. Still, any analysis focused on "if Alyssa had just done x or y differently" is destructive because it creates guilt, and guilt doesn't serve us. The analysis should therefore focus on what comes next. The first step is to model Alyssa's internal hierarchy. Knowing what elevates and degrades Alyssa in her own hierarchy is vital to chart a better future. One way to create this model is through hierarchical journaling. Instead of mindlessly recording her day, thoughts, anxieties, etc., Alyssa could record these items in her journal and then reflect at the end of a period (it doesn't matter how long or short, whatever she is comfortable with) and score each period on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 - bottoming, 2 - descending, 3 - leveling, 4 - ascending, and 5 - peaking, depending on how she felt the period changed her perception of her position in her internal hierarchy.

After collecting many data points, we can look for patterns. Perhaps Alyssa notices that every day she recorded a 5, she volunteered at a not-for-profit clinic. This would be a valuable insight because it would suggest that Alyssa's time spent climbing the private practice hierarchy isn't elevating her within her own hierarchy and that she could be more fulfilled by shifting at least some of the time to volunteer work. Two points are worth keeping in mind in this observation. One, how much time Alyssa should shift to volunteering should be determined through a trial and error process if at all possible. While it is clear from her hierarchical journal that volunteering benefits her, there can be too much of a good thing. Alyssa may be just as unhappy volunteering full-time because of the new financial constraints of such a lifestyle. And two, we can't be afraid of drastic change. If through a trial and error process, Alyssa finds that she dreads her time in private practice and can't get enough time volunteering, drastic changes are in order. Life isn't about who makes the most, accumulates the most, or spends the most. Life is about fulfillment and spending as many days atop our internal hierarchies as possible. The scope of what that looks like externally may vary from Gandhi to a Wal-Mart greeter to Elon Musk. Or maybe something entirely different. It's so bespoke to each of us that only the individual can know.

Maybe another pattern Alyssa notices is that she longs for companionship. Maybe Alyssa's grueling hours spent chasing a prestigious career in private practice didn't leave much time to pursue a partnership or perhaps she just expected that partnership would happen. As noted, participating in the dating hierarchy isn't optional. Since she was an adolescent Alyssa has been a dating hierarchy participant. But just because we must participate doesn't mean we must actively participate. Not actively participating in the dating hierarchy may be a great choice for many as it will free up a lot of time and mental space, which Alyssa used to achieve in other hierarchies. But now she’s ready to shift her role from a sideline participant to being an active participant. To begin the process, Alyssa needs to act like an active participant and not a passive participant who wants to be active. Remember the dating pool is a hierarchy. To climb the hierarchy and determine her optimal level partner, Alyssa needs to test the hierarchy and see where she is now, where she thinks she could position herself, and how those potential positions align with her internal hierarchy. If she doesn't, her partnership options will be limited to only those who approach her. This isn't desirable because everyone participates in the dating pool. Alyssa shouldn't make partnership decisions based on such limited options. Her time is too valuable to limit herself to a small potential pool of partners, especially when her partner if she chooses to have one, will likely be the person she spends more time with than any other person. Hence, rather than settling for the one who approaches, seems like a decent partner with all of the external markers of being a good partner, as System 1 thinking has led a vast number of people to do, Alyssa should employ System 2 thinking to solve her desire for companionship.

Once she finds a way into the game, Alyssa should enter the dating scene through trial and error, similar to her volunteer work, rather than jumping into the deep end by signing up to every dating app and spending seven nights a week at a bar or coffee shop. Too much enthusiasm, especially for a subject as emotionally charged as dating, leads to exhaustion, leaving us too tired to ignite our System 2 thinking. So exhausted, we resort to System 1 thinking, which leads to suboptimal decisions that rely too heavily on our instincts. In other words, using instinct in our dating life leads us to overemphasize a potential partner's physical attractiveness and underemphasize a potential partner's happiness attributes.

And this is unsurprising. We are animals, after all, and the one characteristic that we all share is the drive to propagate our genes. Physical attraction taps into this urge because we associate physical attractiveness with vitality, health, and good genetics. All traits we want to pass on with our genes. There is nothing inherently wrong with this way of thinking. It has served our species well for tens of thousands of years and would probably continue to serve the collective us well, but not necessarily the individual. The collective us needs a constant supply of healthy and strong people with good genetics. But the individual, or at least the individual's long-term happiness, requires more than that.

For one, propagating requires sex, but sex often isn't about propagating. If Alyssa is after sex and nothing more, then there's limited harm in using System 1 thinking to find the most attractive sex partner possible. But a long-term partnership involves much more than sex, which is why long-term partnership decision-making requires System 2 thinking.

Using System 2 thinking, Alyssa should enter the dating pool and explore her options. If she is happy with the options available to her (e.g., she admires the individuals she can get dates with, they make her happy, and she finds them acceptably attractive), then she should explore the permutations of partnership lives available to her. She could do this by dating people to find out whether she likes intellectual or athletic partners, partners with careers or someone that might let their career take a back seat to hers, homebody partners or partners that are incessantly doing and going. This isn't an exhaustive list, but it's a start and covers the primary personality traits that will impact the dynamics and day-to-day feel of the relationship. Alyssa may evaluate her options (hierarchical journaling would be an excellent place to start) and realize she doesn't care for any of them. In this case, she either needs to find out how to climb the dating hierarchy to attain what she seeks or learn to like the options available. This may require making more money, getting more fit, or reigning in an ego. We all want to be loved for who we are, and we deserve to be, but who we are doesn't always entitle us to what we want. Sometimes we have to change ourselves, and the tradeoff is moving up and scoring the partner we want, and sometimes we have to accept ourselves and the type of partner we can attract. While the solution may seem obvious, especially to Type-A personalities, external achievement does not equate to internal achievement, and climbing higher in the dating pool hierarchy is not better. It is just higher. What is better is an open question without a universally right or wrong answer.

Many will find this lack of universal truth to be endlessly frustrating because societal development has given us the tools to achieve at narrowly defined tasks, even very difficult ones. Tell us how to achieve, and we will do it. This is, after all, the basic methodology to attain good grades in Western culture. But no one can tell us how to be happy in a partner relationship (or any relationship) because only we know that. And this applies to any form of happiness. In this sense, happiness can't be prescribed; it must be discovered. And it must be discovered by us. The process of discovery inherently means that we don't know where we are going, so we must keep our minds open to what our destination may look like.

At the outset, we may envision warm salty air on a white sand beach, a serene mountain creek, or, in Alyssa's case, a tall, dark, and handsome man with a Harvard education and deep pockets. But as we set out on our journeys, we may realize that there are bugs and hurricanes on the beach, coyotes and snow in the mountains, and Alyssa may realize that while she loves the status that comes from partnering with her tall, dark, and handsome man, she doesn't love he spends 12 hours a day at work, gives most of his free time to training for another marathon, and doesn't share her love of brownies because they might hurt his figure. System 1 thinking would fail to account for any of these potential drawbacks. Instead, System 1 thinking would tell us that these options are desirable because each elevates our status. However, in the process of discovering, we apply System 2 thinking to find that despite our initial intuition that we should strive for these destinations, that perhaps the cons outweigh the pros, and that we have no idea what we actually want or what will make us happy. Our instinctual destination may be a partnership, a career, or even a new hobby. But be wary of any destination we don’t discover as a desirable destination.

Ultimately, the discovery process is one of methodical trial and error. It's the scientific method applied to life. It shuns our instincts and takes us off autopilot. It forces us to put our internal hierarchies first and accept that we don't know what makes us happy or what is best for us. Utilizing the framework laid out here, we know that our opinion of ourselves counts for a lot and we should persistently strive to raise it. We also know that not all respect is created equally. Some types will make us happy and some will elevate our societal respect but fail to either make us happy to raise us in our internal hierarchies.

This is the key point. The purpose of this isn't to motivate you to conquer your hierarchies. The purpose of this isn't even to push you to climb your hierarchies. The purpose is to inspire you to think critically about your life. Hierarchical traps are everywhere. Always pulling us in and shaming us for not climbing high enough or fast enough. For some, the only view may be from the top, but for many, the view from halfway up is just as good and requires a fraction of the time and effort. And for many others, the view looking up is even more appealing and requires even less effort. Some of you may say that to accept the view from the bottom or even halfway up is to accept failure. But it's failure only in society's self-serving and arbitrary game. Your game is to achieve durable happiness, which is why the only hierarchy you need to climb is yours. Reframe your perspective to focus on your game, and failure becomes spending time on things that don't make you happy. Sure, playing a different game than everyone else is likely to invite judgment and criticism, but so what?

In the words of Naval Ravikant, "Life is a single player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone. All of your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You’re gone in three generations and no one cares. Before you showed up nobody cared. It’s all single player." No single-player game has ever been won by accommodating the opinions of others not playing the game. We've all been told that "we're in this together." But we aren't. Life is a single-player game. Acknowledge it, accept it, and then go win your game.