The Upper Middle “Status Symbol” survey examined how high-earning professionals perform success in a world where a growing number of people have traditional markers of success – income, education, geography, affect – and most of them cluster around high-opportunity metroplexes. When everyone has a Peloton and a master’s degree, status symbols cease to be about wealth and become about targeted signaling and obscuring sources of privilege with personal mystique. Successful strivers seek status symbols that obscure what they lack, whether that’s material comfort commensurate with their accomplishments or accomplishments commensurate with their material comfort.
Where climbers must project achievement, those that have already climbed (or started on top) must project more specific ambitions to achieve status within smaller and smaller in-groups – whether that’s tennis players, sailors, or non-profiteers. This pressure is most acute for the semi-rich, who don’t wish to be seen as coin-operated, but who also need to collect a lot of coins in order to pay for Loeffler Randall flats, CB2 rugs, and apartments that photograph well, but feel claustrophobic. This creates a dynamic where signals of wealth are less powerful than signals of discernment, making price less of a factor than scarcity, singularity, and, TBH, sex appeal.
The Travel Thing
As high-earning American professionals accumulate wealth, our symbolic consumption layers up. The first layer is practical (primary homes, vehicles). The second is experiential (secondary homes, travel). The third is social or “positional” (clubs, private schools). As such, demand for status symbols has a more or less linear relationship with wealth.
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