A lot of people these days seem to be obsessed with prestige.

I came across an interesting article in The New York Times yesterday. It was about a faculty position that had been posted by UCLA seeking an adjunct professor with PhD's in biology and chemistry that would teach a semester course for $0. It was very clear in the advertisement that there would be no monetary compensation offered at all. The university faced tremendous backlash for the advertisement, and it eventually took the job offer down from its website. But being The New York Times, the story did not stop there.

The writer of the article dug deeper, and they discovered what has been suspected of much of academia for some time: that professors oftentimes accept jobs without compensation for the prestige of being able to add "professor" of X at X University to their resume. Many of these professors who did engage in this behavior regret it, and realize in hindsight that they were being exploited. The university in its defense says that it is just offering things that are competitive with the labor market. They literally get hundreds upon hundreds of applicants for one job opening, and so with this huge slush pool, they feel that the prestige of working for them is oftentimes "enough" in payment. But as another person pointedly said, "You cannot eat prestige."

So it got me thinking...and this in turn sent me down an internet rabbit hole...and what I discovered about what I call "the obsession with prestige" is actually very telling about America. You see, more and more people are hunting for prestige in America and psychologists don't really have an explanation for why this is happening. The phenomenon is an outlier when it is compared to historical data. People are seeking out prestige now more than ever, and in greater numbers when examined "per capita." It's affected everything, but let me tell you of a few examples.

In dating, there are numbers that show that people prefer partners who can bring some prestige into a relationship. In other words, it's not just 1) looks, 2) fitness, 3) income and wealth but now there is a fourth component called "prestige." A person might think, they have a house and a car, but they got that house and car by being a janitor at the local high school. Eh...not for me. In the same situation and the same house and car, someone might think...oh...this person is a lawyer for the veteran's administration. That's kind of neat. And that ends up sealing the deal. In other words, it doesn't matter that they possess "X" good. What matters now is how they got "X." This also flies in the face that par for the course of life is now a middle class job. If you've ever played golf, you know that if you can meet par, then you are doing reasonably well. This also means that if you cannot make par, that you have a ton of work to do. In the golf course of life, a lot of people are unable to make par, yet they pretend that they have the abilities of Tiger Woods in his prime.

And many people prefer prestige in jobs, even if they don't pay anything. In another article I saw, a man with self-awareness wrote about how his obsession with prestige caused him to go to business conferences incurring expenses that his family could not afford. While at this business conference, he handed out cards that said he was "CEO" of his company, and he cheated on his wife by saying to attractive women at the conference that he was looking for a "VP of Marketing." He said that women would drive 100 miles round trip to meet him for dinner in San Francisco just so that they could talk about what it might be like to be VP of Marketing for him. And his company was a complete fake. It made no money and was just a pipe dream. He had a wife and kids at home and was a school teacher. Just the very scent of "prestige" was enough to cause people to leap at these opportunities.

In the last article I found (regarding a toxic relationship with prestige), a psychologist spoke about people who aren't sure of what goals to pursue in life. These (in large part) younger folks actually place "prestige" as the actual goal. In other words, in absence of a life plan and feeling the pressure to "do something," they focus all of their energies on something prestigious. "I want to work at Google," or "I want to work at Goldman Sachs" or "I want to be a doctor." And they throw themselves into fulfilling whatever requirement it takes to get the prestige they are seeking and not really knowing anything at all what the day-to-day responsibilities of that job are.

The Oxford Dictionary defines "Prestige" as a noun that means the "widespread respect and admiration felt for someone or something on the basis of a perception of their achievements or quality." But hunting for prestige on top of the things that you actually need 1) food, 2) shelter, 3) air, and possibly 4) companionship seems to be a weird turn of events. For starters, hunting for prestige sets up anxiety and fear in that you may never attain it. Second, if you do get the prestige, if you don't fully understand what it is that you were seeking like (for example) a job at Google, then you might end up really hating the hours and hating the work you do, and it ends up being something you regret.

Furthermore, prestige hunting also feeds into misogyny in untold ways, insisting on virgin brides being just one example. Prestige-hunting also sets up gatekeepers in positions of power (Harvey Weinstein being a great example of this). But at its most basic level, a person who is obsessed with prestige is going to have a really hard time finding anyone who is good enough for them. The epidemic of loneliness that is sweeping the first world may (in fact) be caused by an obsession with prestige. People aren't "good enough" for other people and are thus discarded. So people end up not communicating with each other, and daughters no longer communicate with mothers, because they fear such associations may harm whatever prestige they've managed to obtain in their lives. It also feeds into celebrity mania, in that ordinary people become increasingly obsessed with celebrities because they envision that being with "this person" would fulfill me even though they know absolutely nothing of what that person is like in private.

Anyway, these are all things that I think about. This particular one all popped up in my head because I read that article in the New York Times. But I do have a question for you: If you believe this hypothesis that people care more for prestige now than they ever have, what do you suppose is driving it? And if you will indulge me a second question it is this: do you have any examples in your life where someone seemed to be obsessed with prestige, and they came to harm because of it?