The Shame carousel

Four old friends meet for lunch. The kind of lunch that takes three attempts to schedule and ends up running longer than it should. The first friend is beaming. He places his brand-new iPhone gingerly on the table like it’s a piece of jewellery. It’s not just a phone—it’s the most profitable consumer product in human history. It hasn’t done much new in five years, but still, here it is, gleaming on the table. A totem. An announcement: I’m doing well.

To his left, a friend pulls out a Pixel. Android-based, cheaper, faster, more powerful. A small rebellion. A way of saying, I’m not a sucker like you. Not to be outdone, the third produces a waterproof flip phone from over a decade ago. It barely texts, but it still works. His smile says it all: I’ve transcended the game.

And then there’s the fourth—no phone at all. He doesn’t need one. His assistant takes care of it. No gestures, no performance. His status is in the fact that he doesn’t need to signal it. He just is.

And around the circle we go.

This is how we keep the engine running. In a society with more than enough—enough food, shelter, bandwidth—we have to invent scarcity. So we create a scarcity of meaning. A scarcity of dignity. We create situations where people with full bellies and working central heating still feel like they’re falling behind.

The sociologist Max Weber would have called this a “status group” in action. For Weber, status isn’t just about money or things; it’s about honour, belonging, and the subtle rituals that mark us as insiders or outsiders. Like the difference between ordering a flat white versus an oat cortado. Or knowing which wine will pair well with the meal. The lunch table becomes a stage for these rituals. The iPhone, the Pixel, the flip phone, even the absence of a phone—each is a carefully chosen prop in the ongoing performance of social distinction. Status, Weber argued, is about the boundaries we draw and the signals we send, often more powerful than any material possession. It’s not about the thing. It’s about what the thing means.

We’ve built a machine where the goal isn’t to have, but to have more than your neighbour. And the thing that drives that machine isn’t ambition, or greed, or even insecurity. It’s shame.

Shame is one of the six core human emotions, right up there with happiness and fear. But unlike fear, which keeps us alive, shame keeps us in line. It tells us where we belong in the pecking order. It’s the soft weapon of the tribe. You don’t need to be told you're losing—just shown a few signs that you’re not quite winning. And suddenly, you’ll bend. You’ll buy the thing. You’ll work late. You’ll stay quiet. You’ll perform.

Because shame isn’t just unpleasant—it’s existential. If status is the social currency, shame is the overdraft notice. Shame keeps us chasing status. Status keeps us fearing shame. Round and round we go.

And it’s not new. Back in 17th-century France, the state wasn’t keeping up with the empires of Spain or England. They didn’t have as many colonies, as many markets, as much control. So Jean-Baptiste Colbert, finance minister to Louis XIV, cooked up a different kind of conquest. He blessed industries like lace and leather, supported them, protected them, turned them into national treasures. And what they produced weren’t just goods—they were symbols. Markers. You bought lace not because it kept you warm, but because it told everyone else you could afford lace. You spent more than you needed to, to show that you could.

That’s the origin story. The point wasn’t function. It was difference. A ratchet for status.

Hundreds of years later, we’re still ratcheting.

But what happens when the traditional status games—phones, clothes, holidays, LinkedIn bios—start to break down? When economic pressures squeeze so hard that keeping up becomes impossible for most people? We don’t stop playing the game. We just shift the arena. If I can’t win by earning more, I’ll win by belonging more. If I can’t afford status through consumption, I’ll find it through identity.

So the lunch table becomes a ballot box. The iPhone becomes a flag. The admin becomes the real people who 'built this country.' Status doesn't disappear—it just finds new teams. National vs immigrant. Woke vs based. Zionist vs pro-Palestine. Inside vs outside. The logic is the same: draw a circle around a group and claim higher ground by standing inside it. It’s still status. Still shame. Just in a different dialect.

And the machinery still runs. The same tribal shame that once nudged you toward a luxury upgrade now also nudges you toward ideological purity. The same algorithms that ranked your selfie are now ranking whether your politics are correct. You can’t afford the newest phone—but you can afford to be right.

Platforms that pretend to be social are mostly just digitised theatres for status display. They give us metrics, filters, algorithms that reinforce who’s up and who’s down. They give us a stage. And a scoreboard.

And here's the kicker: we think we're playing the game. But really, we are the game. The platforms aren’t selling products to us—they’re selling us to advertisers. The product is our attention. And what’s being harvested, moment by moment, is not just our time, but our emotional volatility. They show us just enough of the people we aspire to be or envy or loathe—and then slot in the ad. The solution. The product. The thing that might soothe the shame.

You’re not imagining it. You’re not weak for feeling it. That edge of dissatisfaction? That need to keep up, to prove, to post, to perform—it’s built in. It’s the whole mechanism.

What’s powerful, though, is this: once you see the mechanism, it loses some of its grip. Shame works best when it’s invisible. When it just feels like “the way things are.” But when you start to notice the nudge—the ad placed just after a luxury haul video, the “friend” who seems to be thriving, the algorithmic reminder that your phone is now “old”—you stop being a pawn. You can choose, even briefly, to step off the carousel.

Not forever, maybe. But even just long enough to notice the motion. To realise that this constant sense of lagging behind isn’t an accident—it’s a business model.

And the next time you’re sat at a table with four friends and four phones—or maybe no phones—you’ll feel it. The pull. The performance. The little theatre of status. But maybe this time, you’ll watch it play out without feeling like you have to play along.