Benedict Schau on Knowingless

-> You might think of all this as cold, but it’s built into your behavior so deeply that you likely don’t even see it. I think status is often depicted as/sold as "things that make you happy", rather than "things that other people want". You are not encouraged to seek a high-paying career because it raises your status, but because being highly-paid supposedly makes one more happy (which is true to some degree, but hedonic treadmill and logarithmic increases in happiness only, so it probably feels untrue for a decent amount of people). If it were more explicit "this will raise your status", some people probably would not attempt that. I think the majority of people genuinely do care more about being happy than about having a high status, and are status-seeking because the two things are conflated and society does not do a good job at disentangling them. If the high status thing they are vying for doesn't make them as happy as they thought it would make them, it feels hollow - and after such an experience, they look for something different to make them happy, which probably also is status-increasing, because of that conflation. For example, Kayleigh from your story might realize that her local frienships are a lot more meaningful to her and invest in those. This might come with an increase in status (as somebody who invests in their friendships is something other people want), but that's incidental and not the motivation for doing it. So I'd think most people are very aware that they are happiness-seeking, and only lack awareness that they are doing so by incidentally also improving the odds of being higher-status.