The old flex was what you bought. A bag, a car, a watch. Status through possession. You worked hard, you earned money, and you proved it by acquiring things that other people could recognise and envy. The logo on your chest was a scoreboard. The car in your drive was a press release. For decades, this was the game. Conspicuous consumption was the language of success, and everyone was fluent.
That era is ending. Not because people stopped wanting status -- they didn't, and they never will. Status is hardwired. What's changed is the currency. The signals that say "I've made it" have shifted so fundamentally that most brands, and most people, haven't caught up. They're still playing the old game while the rules have already been rewritten.
The new flex isn't what you own. It's what you know, what you've built, and -- perhaps most tellingly -- what you've chosen not to have.
The new status symbols
Pay attention to what people actually show off now. Not in luxury advertising, but in real life. On social media. In conversation. The things that generate genuine envy and admiration have changed.
A curated bookshelf photographed in soft light. A portfolio of side projects that actually work. A Substack with a thousand subscribers. Knowing about a restaurant, a brand, or an artist before everyone else. Quitting a prestigious job to do something that matters. A morning routine that involves zero screens. A wardrobe of twenty pieces that all work together.
These are status symbols. They just don't look like the old ones. Instead of signalling spending power, they signal something harder to buy: taste, agency, knowledge, and self-possession. You can't fake a curated bookshelf. You can't buy your way to an interesting portfolio. You can't purchase the cultural knowledge that lets you discover things before they're mainstream.
The game hasn't changed. The currency has.
This isn't just a generational quirk. It's a structural shift in how status operates. When mass production and fast fashion made luxury logos accessible to almost everyone, the logos stopped working as signals. When you can buy a convincing dupe of almost anything, owning the real thing loses its power. The old flex relied on scarcity. The new flex relies on discernment.
Taste as currency
Here's what happened: access became universal. Fast fashion, dupes, knockoffs, and the sheer volume of available products meant that almost anyone could approximate the look of wealth. Zara can get a runway design into shops within weeks. AliExpress can produce a passable version of almost anything. The information asymmetry that luxury brands relied on -- "you don't even know this exists" -- collapsed.
When everyone can buy the same things, or close enough, buying stops being the differentiator. What replaces it is choosing. Not what you can afford, but what you select. The person wearing COS and Uniqlo with intention signals more taste than the person wearing head-to-toe logos without thought. The person with fifty carefully chosen books says more about themselves than the person with a designer bag.
Taste has become the new spending power. It's the ability to scan a vast field of options and consistently pick the right ones. To know the difference between what's popular and what's good. To curate rather than accumulate. This is a fundamentally different skill from earning money, and it's one that can't be outsourced, inherited, or faked for long.
Knowledge works the same way. Knowing about things -- the right things, early, and with genuine understanding rather than surface awareness -- has become a form of cultural capital. The person who was listening to a band two years before they broke through. The person who can explain why a particular typeface works. The person who reads essays rather than headlines. This knowledge doesn't cost money. It costs attention, curiosity, and time. Which makes it, in many ways, more expensive than money ever was.
The builder flex
Of all the new status symbols, building is perhaps the most powerful. Making things has become the ultimate flex -- not because it's difficult (AI is making it easier every month) but because it demonstrates the full stack of new-status qualities: taste, knowledge, agency, and follow-through.
Side projects. Substacks. Newsletters. Products. Apps. Curated directories. The portfolio is replacing the pay stub as the proof of capability. "What have you made?" is becoming a more interesting question than "Where do you work?" -- because what you make reveals how you think, what you care about, and whether you can actually execute on an idea rather than just talk about one.
This is a profound shift. For decades, your employer was your status signal. Goldman Sachs. McKinsey. Google. The name on your LinkedIn was the equivalent of the logo on your chest. That's not gone entirely, but it's weakening. Increasingly, the most impressive people in a room are the ones who can point to something they built. Not something they helped build at a company of ten thousand. Something they made. Themselves.
The builder flex works because it combines multiple signals at once. It shows taste (you made something good), knowledge (you understood a problem worth solving), agency (you did it without being told to), and independence (you didn't need permission or resources). It's the compound interest of the new status economy.
What brands should learn
Most brands are still marketing like it's 2010. Aspiration through acquisition. "Buy this and become this person." It worked when the purchase was the hardest part. When getting the thing was the achievement. But when getting the thing is easy and choosing the right thing is hard, the entire value proposition needs to shift.
The brands winning in the new status economy aren't selling products. They're selling membership in a taste community. They're selling knowledge. They're selling the signal that you're the kind of person who would choose them.
Aesop doesn't sell soap. It sells the signal that you care about the details of daily life -- that even your hand wash is considered. Stripe Press doesn't sell books. It sells the signal that you're intellectually curious in a specific way, that you read about infrastructure and progress and the systems underneath things. Patagonia doesn't sell jackets. It sells the signal that you've opted out of conspicuous consumption while still having excellent taste in functional design.
These brands understand that the product is almost secondary to the meaning. They've made the leap from "here's what we sell" to "here's what choosing us says about you." And what it says isn't "I can afford this." It's "I know about this. I chose this. I'm this kind of person."
Any brand still leading with aspiration-through-ownership is going to struggle. The playbook now is aspiration-through-association. Not "own this to be successful" but "choose this to belong to something." The brands that crack this -- that become cultural signals rather than just products -- will own the next decade.
The shift from having to knowing to making
Status has always been a moving target. It was land, then titles, then money, then possessions. Each era's status symbols reflected what was scarce. Land was scarce when most people had none. Money was scarce when most people earned little. Luxury goods were scarce when most people couldn't access them.
Today, stuff isn't scarce. Attention is. Taste is. The willingness to build something from nothing is. Agency -- the power to choose your own path rather than follow the prescribed one -- is the scarcest resource of all.
That's the new flex. Not what you have but what you've done with what's available to everyone. The person who took the same tools, the same information, the same access as everybody else and made something distinctive with it. The person who looked at the infinite options and chose well. The person who built their own world rather than buying someone else's.
The old status economy rewarded accumulation. The new one rewards curation, creation, and the confidence to subtract. The old question was "What do you have?" The new question is "What have you made, what do you know, and what did you choose to leave behind?"
Most people haven't noticed the shift yet. They will.
