I don’t know if anyone even asks themselves why I’m writing this – about money, projections and desires. I mean, it’s obvious – it’s one of the fundamental problems everybody seems to have, and it’s recurring, and it never goes away for as long as you’re alive. It’s as pervasive as gravity. You can’t overstate it.

And yet, some people do overstate it, and make it into all there is, while others understate it and pretend it’s not a big deal.

Your place in society is important. It defines your level of access to resources. This, in turn, traditionally meant not only the difference between having food and shelter or not; it also meant the difference between being able to reproduce or not, and the difference between being protected at all cost, and being sent into the dark as the first one to die in a crisis. So, status symbols usually came with one’s position in society, and people learned to try to replicate and fake those, probably in order to confuse people into giving them more respect and resources than they would normally command. It works on people who don’t know you, but not on those who do.

So, obviously, everything that deals with your status in society is a matter of genetic programming, and you will instinctively try to make the best possible impression. However, overdoing it will ruin you and achieve the opposite.

To me, the entire thing is weird, because my instinct, and here I mean the true me, is to calm things down and try to be as understated as possible, in order not to intimidate or scare people. It took me a while to understand that here, in this body, in this world, this is a wasted effort, because most people won’t know or perceive anything about me anyway, and too much of an understated appearance is actually counterproductive. So, the thing about status symbols and perceptions is something I had to learn here, because I never had to, before.