Social status is special. It's valueless wealth.
You can have great social status, or a great wife, but as 'great wife' is defined as a % of your wealth cap, you can't have both. Unlike money, you can't buy anything with social status. Unlike health, it doesn't feel good. You won't be wise, so the world won't make sense.
You can have a marriage, a relationship and cooperation, or you can have a trophy, someone for showing off, but you can't have both. Nobody is that rich; guaranteed, as this is a relative thing. Your competitors are others with similar wealth caps, who can afford exactly as much wife as you can. If you try to underspend on wifing but get a trophy/cooperator combo in that category, she will be less attractive than your rivals' choices.
Even if you do have money, you won't be able to spend it; it won't be real money. If you have a great house you won't be able to spend time at it. If you have an amazing car collection you'll be too afraid to drive them on the actual road. (And anyway you can't legally drive tanks on the road.) If you can spend it at all, it will have to be spent on maintaining your social status. Rat race treadmill.
Even if your prestige attracts numerous wonderful scholars, you won't be able to understand what they say. You won't be able to sift the wheat from the chaff. It will be impossible to secure yourself against charlatans without also securing yourself against the folk you were trying to attract. This extends to dieticians and personal trainers. The prestige (or money) on offer will select for scammers who spend time on marketing, not on lorekeepers who spend time on gathering lore.
I suppose the wealth cap explains the problem with polygyny. It is impossible to afford two wives of the quality of a singular wife you could afford. If you get a bunch of wives to show off, they will all be individually terrible. Among other things they won't be able to get along. Total wife wealth remains constant.
Unlike great friends, you can't spend time with your social status.
If you get in trouble, your friends will help you.
If you get in trouble, your social status will attract rivals who will try to kick you while you're down.
Social status is just there. It is still an allocation of wealth cap, because the holder values it.
Relative or zero-sum competitions are never worth engaging in unless they have some non-zero-sum side-effect. All you manage is trading useful wealth for useless wealth. Accumulating social status makes you poorer in every way that matters.
Perhaps that's a good thing. You should seek huge social status precisely because it's a huge handicap. Take on the challenge, win anyway. Fail and fail and fail to have wealth against social status, so that you can finally succeed in losing all you social status.
I can't help but say this is still the worst option.
Other handicaps are useful to others. If I break my back hoeing a row in a farm, others can at least eat the grown food. If I break my back trying a backflip, there is no useful wealth as a side-effect.
I've said it before: seeking social status is inherently traitorous. It is a crime. As such, social status double-dips. A crime committed is wealth and counts against the cap, separate from any wealth you gain from it. This is why you can't spend the money that accrues to social status. Your social status cap is at most half your total cap, as the other half is taken up by the crimes necessary to build the status.
I think I could say that more clearly. If you steal $10, you have $10, which counts against your cap, and someone else is out $10, which also counts against your cap.
If you sell something worth $10, you have $10 against your cap.
Not really that complicated, yeah?
Not only is someone else out $10, their suffering counts against your cap. The stolen $10 is worth less than $5 of legitimately-gained wealth, see? This is why criminals want you to be happy about crime. Relieves the pressure on their cap.
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