Introduction
We do not decide what to want as independently as we like to believe.
In a complex society, most of what we value is learned indirectly: by watching who gets attention, who is admired, and what kinds of lives appear to succeed. We observe, we imitate, and over time, those patterns harden into something that feels like personal preference.
This process is not superficial. It is one of the primary ways human societies organize themselves.
What begins as imitation becomes signaling. Traits become markers. Markers become hierarchies. And hierarchies, once visible, begin to shape behavior at scale.
In earlier essays, we examined the long civilizational rhythms that govern periods of stability and breakdown. But those dynamics do not operate in abstraction. They are expressed through everyday social behavior.
To understand what this actually looks like from the inside, we have to look more closely at the signals people send, and the signals they choose to follow.
Learning What to Want
If we learn what to want from others, the next question is how that process actually works.
At a basic level, it begins with imitation. Children acquire language, habits, and social norms by observing those around them. But more importantly, they also learn what is worth caring about. They absorb signals about what is admirable, what is embarrassing, what is desirable, and what is to be avoided.
This process does not end in childhood. Adults continue to rely on social cues to navigate an environment that is far too complex to evaluate from first principles. Faced with an overwhelming number of possible goals, lifestyles, and identities, we look outward. We pay attention to what others pursue, what others reward, and what others ignore.
Over time, this creates a form of distributed sense-making. Individuals do not need to understand the entire system; they only need to track others' behavior within it.
René Girard described a closely related phenomenon as mimetic rivalry: people learn what to want by observing what others have and want. Desire, in this view, is not simply internal. It is socially mediated, shaped by models that we imitate, compete with, and sometimes unconsciously adopt.
Once desire becomes mediated in this way, it is no longer just about objects or outcomes. It becomes relational. What matters is not only what something is but also who else wants it and why.
Traits as Signals
When desire is shaped through social influences, it starts to focus on observable models.
Visible success acquires great importance. If someone appears admired, wealthy, influential, or powerful, others naturally look to them as reference points. Their choices, possessions, affiliations, and behaviors become clues about what is worth pursuing.
When people begin imitating the traits associated with successful individuals, those traits start to function as signals of status in their own right.
These traits, and their associated signals, make hierarchies legible.
This creates a reinforcing loop. As more people pay attention to someone, copy them, or orient themselves around them, that individual often gains even more influence, visibility, social centrality, and all of the associated benefits.
Success attracts attention, attention attracts success.
In certain situations, the appearance of success can be turned into attention, which can then be turned into durable forms of success.
In the era of mass media, the potential for status amplification through inbound attention has increased dramatically, alongside the increasing amounts of inbound attention available.
Status increasingly depends not only on achievement but on visibility, while the relative importance of achievement has decreased in favor of visibility as the key driver.
Prestige hierarchies form, signals emerge, and imitation spreads through society.
The Social Dynamics of Cliodynamics
When large numbers of people simultaneously compete for recognition, influence, and elite status, the loop accelerates. Signals multiply, imitation intensifies, and status competition becomes more visible and more aggressive.
History offers many examples of this escalation. In the late Roman Republic, elite families competed fiercely for prestige through triumphal parades, public games, and monumental construction projects. These displays were not merely acts of generosity; they were signals in a struggle for status and influence. As competition intensified, the displays grew larger and more expensive, until political rivalry eventually spilled over into open conflict.
Similar dynamics appeared in other societies: aristocrats at Versailles competed through elaborate court rituals and displays of proximity to the king, while Gilded Age industrialists competed through ever more extravagant homes and philanthropic projects. In each case, intensified elite competition drove a signaling arms race.
As discussed in my previous essay, this pattern becomes especially pronounced during periods of elite overproduction. As the number of people seeking elite status grows faster than the number of positions available, rivalry becomes more intense, more visible, and more difficult to contain.
Competition is Stratified
In the animal kingdom, dominance contests usually occur between individuals of similar strength or rank. A weaker animal rarely challenges a much stronger rival because it would be unwise, while a dominant animal gains little social benefit by confronting an individual far below its level. As a result, serious contests tend to occur between near equals, where the outcome is uncertain, and the stakes are high.
Human status competition follows a similar pattern. Rivalry tends to be most intense among direct peers: individuals with roughly similar levels of power, resources, or social visibility.
Punching “up” is difficult (you’ll usually be ignored), and punching “down” is often seen as a sign of weakness.
The ultra-wealthy no longer compete over the same markers that structure middle-class life. Instead, they compete with one another through increasingly elaborate signals of influence, taste, power, and wealth.
Hierarchy is not Monolithic
At the same time, human societies are more complex than animal dominance hierarchies. Status does not exist along a single ladder. Instead, societies contain many overlapping hierarchies—economic, political, cultural, physical, intellectual, and social—each with its own signals of prestige and success. Some are more correlated than others; some may even be negatively correlated.
Some individuals can (and do) try to opt out of these games, but sometimes they merely switch from one status hierarchy to another. Even when some individuals do successfully opt out, societies as a whole cannot. As long as status hierarchies exist, some form of signaling and rivalry inevitably endures.
Everything Becomes a Signal
The moment you move beyond the hermit scenario and introduce a social dimension to achievement, almost anything a person (or group) does can become a signal.
In complex societies, where people must constantly decide whom to trust, follow, hire, or cooperate with, signals help reduce uncertainty about who someone is and what they can do.
Signals spread through social imitation. As they become widely copied, they lose their exclusivity, and social groups begin searching for new ways to distinguish themselves.
What’s in a Name?
Trends in baby names are a simple, benign example of this competitive dynamic in action: they rarely remain constant over time.
Naming patterns tend to follow a recognizable diffusion cycle. New names—or newly fashionable ones—often appear first within small, culturally influential groups. Sometimes these are high-status families; sometimes they are socially visible subcultures with disproportionate cultural influence. Early adopters choose names that feel distinctive within their social circles.
As those names become visible, they begin to spread outward through imitation. Broader segments of society adopt them. Eventually, the name becomes common enough that it no longer signals distinctiveness. At that point, many of the early adopters move on to other names, and the cycle begins again.
Hollywood celebrities and mass media now accelerate this process, but the underlying dynamic remains the same.
In this sense, a name functions as a social signal. Choosing a fashionable name signals cultural belonging and, sometimes, insider status. But signals only work when they are scarce. Once a name becomes too widely copied, it loses much of its signaling value.
Copying a baby name is therefore not very expensive. Anyone can do it. But knowing which names are beginning to circulate among influential social circles—before they become widely visible—requires something more costly: social proximity, cultural awareness, and insider access to those networks.
A clear example is the name Aidan. Originally a relatively uncommon Irish name, it became fashionable among educated American parents in the 1990s. As its popularity spread, a wave of related names appeared—Jayden, Brayden, Kayden, and others. Within a decade, the pattern had exploded across the broader population. Once this happened, many of the original adopters quietly moved on.
The statistical data on baby names clearly reflect this pattern. When researchers plot the popularity of a name over time, the result typically resembles a bell-shaped diffusion curve. A name begins with a small number of early adopters, rises rapidly as it spreads through society, peaks when it becomes mainstream, and then declines as parents begin searching for something less common.
We can see the long-term effects of this dynamic in national naming data. In the United States in 1916, the most popular boy’s name accounted for roughly 5 percent of all boys born that year. By 2016, the most popular name accounted for less than 1 percent. In other words, the cultural turnover of names has accelerated dramatically, as internet access to trend data makes it easier for parents to avoid names that have become too widely used.
Not every family participates in this signaling game, of course. Many parents simply choose names they like. All the same, the pattern is strong enough to consistently appear in naming data across modern societies.
Names, in other words, behave much like fashion: small signals of identity that circulate through society, gradually losing their exclusivity as they spread.
In pre-revolutionary France, this process was more closely tied to last names than to first names. The particle “de” attached to a surname usually meant “from” a particular place. In many cases, it implied that the family historically owned or ruled the estate or town in question. A name like de Montmorency, de La Fayette, or de Talleyrand-Périgord signaled that the family’s identity was tied to a landed domain.
Originally, this was not just decorative. It reflected the feudal structure of power. Nobility derived status from land and military service, so identifying oneself with a place made sense. If your name was X de Y, it implied that your family had once been the seigneurs of Y.
Over time, however, the particle became a status signal rather than a strict description. Families who had purchased land or government offices began adopting “de” names even when their connection to the place was thin. In some cases, the geographic reference was symbolic rather than literal.
There are still vestiges of this in France today.
In other contexts, similar dynamics appear in different forms. Naming conventions can borrow elements associated with prestige and repurpose them as stylistic affectations, often detached from their original historical meaning. We see this in the use of “de” as a prefix for first names among some American communities today.
Then again, the process can even invert at the top of the hierarchy. Consider HRH Prince William Mountbatten-Windsor, Prince of Wales. If slightly exotic names like “Tarquin” have been used to signal status for your run-of-the-mill aristocrat or plutocrat’s child, then opting for a more traditional name like William can signal status through a refusal to play that game.
When you own several castles, you don’t need to signal who you are through something as pedestrian as an unusual first name. The last name—and the castles—are doing all the heavy lifting. In this case, an “ordinary” first name is a kind of reverse-flex.
What we see time and again is that the most durable signals tend to be the most expensive signals.
As a signal becomes cheaper to imitate, new signals are sought out and found.
Cheap Signals v. Expensive Signals
In evolutionary biology, it is generally understood that the human chin serves little purpose beyond signaling health and vitality. A chin is biologically expensive to grow and indicates that the person sporting it has “biological resources to spare.”
The capacity to expend resources on “mere ornamentation” is itself an important part of the signal.
A protruding chin is the human equivalent of peacock feathers.
In the modern world, we live inside a complex weave of biology and technology, and chins are just one signal among many: vacation homes, sports cars, and yachts are all escalations in the signaling arms race. Of course, acquiring those kinds of resources requires far more coordination and effort than the surplus calories needed to grow a pronounced chin.
Nor can all of this be reduced to money and the things money can buy.
Physical fitness still matters, partly as a biological factor in its own right, but also as a signal that one can manage substantial resources without descending into health-destroying excess. This is one reason why wealthy individuals often place a disproportionate emphasis on health and fitness.
These types of signals are valuable because they are hard to fake. And they are hard to fake because they are expensive. It is not possible to own a superyacht or a mansion in Southampton without the resources to support it. I’m referring, of course, to the ritzy American Southampton, more so than the English one, although you can still spend several million dollars on a home there if you look hard enough.
This is how large amounts of resources get converted into “mere signaling,” something common sense might initially dismiss as wasteful.
I’m not saying that spending time on these yachts isn’t enjoyable—it probably is. But if it were purely about enjoyment, the same experience could be achieved without ~5000 HP of marine engine power, over 80 crew members, a helicopter, an “optional” submarine, and the vast array of supporting systems required to sustain it.
It’s not all about money, either.
It is difficult to maintain peak physical fitness without the time and discipline to devote to it.
It is also difficult to raise multiple children while maintaining the full suite of signals associated with affluent life unless one has access to extensive support systems—nannies, high-quality schooling, and a range of other resources and capabilities.
What is all this Signaling Ultimately For?
Participants in elite-status games rarely discuss them openly, as doing so can undermine their effects. In many cases, participants are not even fully aware of the dynamics in which they are embedded.
There is no single “thing” being signaled—and that is the point.
Signals are context-dependent, shaped by the social environments in which both signalers and observers operate.
Human society behaves less like a single hierarchy and more like a complex system of interwoven nodes. It is a social organism composed of many sub-organisms, with overlapping hierarchies (some visible, others latent), that continually interact and reconfigure.
At a basic level, signaling in the animal kingdom is about attracting mates. In human societies, it extends far beyond that.
Human society is vast and complex, and human cognition has evolved to navigate it. Beyond the basics of family formation, the deeper function of elite signaling lies in demonstrating the ability to coordinate large groups of people to perform complex tasks.
Human society is built on cooperation: within families, tribes, companies, civil society groups, nation-states, and civilizations.
A person seeking to form a family may signal resources and stability, but elite signaling operates at a different scale. What is often being signaled is the ability to coordinate large numbers of people toward shared goals.
Bezos’s yacht, for example, is not just a consumption good. It reflects the enormous economic surplus generated through ideas, organization, and sustained coordination.
We can think of human society as a highly networked super-organism. When the first packet ships departed from Falmouth Harbour for the New World in 1689, they created new coordination problems—risk, timing, and trust — across vast distances. The response was the emergence of maritime insurance markets, including what became Lloyd’s of London: not a single company, but a distributed system of risk-sharing and coordination.
Value in such networks accrues to those who can improve the system's overall effectiveness. This makes cooperation and coordination central to elite signaling.
Signals of coordination capacity—the ability to organize people, resources, and institutions—are therefore among the most important. Unlike material wealth, which often reflects past success, these signals point toward the capacity to generate future outcomes that make certain individuals or groups a source of potential value to collaborators.
Conclusion
The deeper logic of signaling is not vanity, though vanity often rides atop it. Nor is it reducible to consumption, style, or luxury alone. In complex societies, signaling is one of the primary ways human beings navigate uncertainty about one another.
“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible....”
―Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
We rely on signals to navigate competence, resources, trustworthiness, taste, and social position. We copy the signals of those who appear successful, and in doing so, we turn traits, objects, affiliations, and behaviors into socially legible markers of status. As those markers spread, they lose exclusivity, and the search for new signals begins again.
This process is not marginal to human society. It is one of the ways societies make hierarchy visible and therefore actionable.
At the highest levels, what is often being signaled is not merely wealth, but the capacity to coordinate people, institutions, and resources at scale. The yacht, the title, the body, the family, the name, the school, the ritual, and the aesthetic all become partial indicators within a much larger game.
And because human hierarchies are plural rather than singular, the game never resolves into one simple ladder. There are always multiple audiences, multiple currencies of prestige, and multiple forms of competition unfolding at once.
That is why almost everything can become a signal.
And it is also why, in periods of intense elite competition, the signaling game itself becomes one of the clearest windows into the health, or breakdown, of a civilization.
In stable periods, these signals tend to revolve around wealth, taste, or achievement. But when competition intensifies and the stakes rise, the logic of signaling does not remain stable.
It begins to mutate, sometimes into something far less stable and far more destructive.
As always, I welcome your observations, questions, and commentary, and I do my best to read and reply to all of them.
This essay is the first essay in a series: the next essay explores how signals can become self-referential, and detached from reality.
Related Essays
From Systems to Simulacra
In a world where signaling is pervasive, it becomes disconcertingly easy for the system to turn entirely self-referential. This is what Baudrillard warned about—and it is a dynamic already taking hold in our society, as I explore in this essay.
Gstaad Guy's friendship model is highly prevalent among physicians (probably other professions, too). I've never been much into that kind of mutual self-gratification, and at a point in the career the signaling became no longer necessary, so I declined to participate. However, this essay (and the one from May 22, 2025, which I have read for the first time) opens my eyes to how much a change in jobs, a simple parallel move, rekindles that necessity. It's kinda depressing. I am getting close but not quite ready for retirement, and what I most often mention among the points of dissatisfaction is the continual need to be concerned about so many trivial things that simply don't matter. Many of which I would have ignored three or four years ago, but have had to become acutely aware of once again.
Best one yet.