The influencer economy is booming. People write blogs on substack or do podcasts to build a following so as to be able to influence them to buying a product or a service or at the least influencing their opinion on a subject which matters to them or someone deploying them. The followers are a measure of their popularity or brand as some would like to believe or clout as the author of this blog calls it. In any case it is considered to be an asset that can generate income/value for the owner. But assets can appreciate (like house, stocks, precious metals, etc) or depreciate like (vehicle, household appliances, etc). Where does brand in this context or clout or status fall?
Hannah Horvath applies some fundamental thinking to reckon that it depreciates.
“Status, at its core, is a ranking. It’s your position in the invisible pecking order that exists in every group humans form — from a corporate boardroom to a middle school cafeteria. It attempts to answer the question everyone is constantly trying to figure out: how much does this person matter here?
The desire for status is a fundamental human motive. It’s up there with belonging and safety”
She reckons that the digital age has made your status reach potentially infinite: “For most of human history, you compared yourself to a few dozen people you actually knew. Now you compare yourself to thousands (hell, millions) constantly, through a screen that’s algorithmically optimized to make you feel bad about yourself (aspiration is the engine of consumer culture, as I’ve said!). Follower counts, likes, engagement metrics, subscriber numbers — suddenly there were new ways to measure where you stood, and new ways to feel like you were falling behind. Your local ladder got replaced by an infinite one where you can never see the top.”
Growing income and wealth inequality made matters worse: “Economic capital is money. Cultural capital is taste, knowledge, credentials — the stuff that tells people you belong in the room. Social capital is your network. And status is what happens when all three compound. What’s changed is that the infrastructure for this conversion has been explicitly digitized and accelerated. Ways to communicate status have become increasingly tradable, depreciable, and constantly repriced.
The result: status has become an asset class.
…You can build it — personal brand, audience, credentials, visibility. You can invest in it — wardrobe, education, experiences. You can leverage it — convert followers into income, reputation into deal flow, visibility into opportunity. And you can lose it in a crash — a public misstep, a layoff from a prestigious company, an algorithm change that tanks your reach.
Status has its own version of volatility, liquidity, and ROI. Influencers, for example, understand this intuitively. So does anyone who has ever spent money they didn’t have on something they didn’t need in order to maintain a position they weren’t sure they occupied.”
Hannah links this to the excessive consumerism exasperated by how quickly what is cool changes driving you to catch up with it and worse, chasing get-rich-quick schemes and other things, all of which has a depreciating effect.
“When you stake your self-worth on outcomes you can’t fully control, your self-concept becomes volatile. And because status is now so fractured, you’re not managing one self-concept. You’re managing dozens. The version of you on Instagram. The version at work. The version your friends know. The version strangers infer from your apartment, your clothes, your taste.
Each one requires maintenance and can be undermined by a change in the winds. Researchers have started calling this identity fatigue — the exhaustion that comes from constantly performing a curated self. A 2025 meta-analysis found consistent links between higher social media engagement and lower self-evaluation, increased anxiety, and depressive symptoms.
This helps explain brain rot culture or people online that seem to have no other identity outside of media consumption or buying things.”
She ends with instead how we can fulfil our innate desire to feel we matter:
“Alain de Botton wrote that the pursuit of status has less to do with material comfort than with love — that what we’re really chasing when we chase rank is the assurance that we matter to someone. That we won’t be abandoned. That we’re worthy of attention and care. Which makes the whole status economy feel even crueler, because the version of status our current system sells — the one made of metrics and money and things that scale digitally — is the one least likely to deliver the thing we actually want.”
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Note: The above material is neither investment research, nor financial advice. Marcellus does not seek payment for or business from this publication in any shape or form. The information provided is intended for educational purposes only. Marcellus Investment Managers is regulated by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and is also an FME (Non-Retail) with the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA) as a provider of Portfolio Management Services. Additionally, Marcellus is also registered with US Securities and Exchange Commission (“US SEC”) as an Investment Advisor.
