There’s a real tension between things that are useful and things that communicate something. An LV bag isn’t really about carrying your stuff — it’s about what it says when you’re carrying it. On the other end, something can be incredibly practical and useful and signal absolutely nothing. And then you have things like NFTs, which sit at the extreme of pure signal with basically no utility underneath, something researchers at Harvard actually studied as a test bed for conspicuous consumption because the data was so clean. I’m a practical person — I don’t see much value in status for its own sake — but I still find the tension genuinely interesting to think about.
What’s strange is that even when you feel like you’re opting out of this game, you’re still playing it. Articles of Interest covered this well — the idea that your choices always say something, even the ones designed to say nothing. This connects to The Subtleties of Social Signaling: Beyond the Price Tag, because a lot of signaling is happening beneath the surface of what people think they’re doing. It’s not just physical goods either. It’s who you spend time with, where you choose to go, what you choose not to own. It’s kind of everything.
There’s probably a delicate balance where the two things don’t fully cancel each other out. Well-made, genuinely practical things aren’t cheap — and in not being cheap, they end up communicating status anyway. Research on luxury signaling actually breaks this into two competing strategies — conspicuous versus inconspicuous — which maps pretty well onto what I’m noticing here. The practical-but-expensive object quietly signals. The flashy object loudly signals. Neither is fully neutral, which is part of what makes Luxury Beliefs such a useful frame — belief and behavior both get caught up in this.
For me personally, it’s a continuous game of discernment. I’m always trying to ask whether something actually does what I need it to do, and to be honest with myself when the answer is that I’m drawn to what it communicates instead. Academic work on the conflicting drivers behind luxury purchases suggests people rarely have a single clean motive, which tracks with my experience — subconsciously you kind of do both, even when you’re convinced you’re only doing one. Staying aware of that is the practice. What if I think about NFTs about as a certificate or a diploma? is where I’ve been thinking through what happens when something is almost entirely signal, and whether that signal can ever be enough on its own.