No, I don't see it. Status is permanently ingrained into the human psyche. You can play around a little bit with how exactly to gain that status, but there is no way that between now and the heat death of the universe that human beings will not be obsessed with status. And I'm including Buddhist monks and Indian Swami's etc. in that.
You can sort-of have a situation were being poor is cool and provides a certain type of status, but if you dig deeper in 99.9% of the cases the person seeking status this way is not actually poor. He's just another middle class kid with the typical middle class neuroses. Or to be a bit crude: "Wankster, not Gangster." People who are actually poor have a different raft of problems and their own ways to seek status.
We all have a tendency to rationalise our personal predicaments. (IMHO this type of rationalisation is, on balance, healthy, but that's a separate debate). So for example a guy who is unathletic and arty will often become a hipster, rather than a jock. It is the best way he can compete in the world. And obviously the reverse is also true. The natural athletic guy becomes a jock or bodybuilder etc. And each will swear to high heaven that their way of gaining status is the "best" way or "the way of the future". And they are all wrong. Every last one of them. There are (more than) 101 ways to skin a cat.
So, someone who is not able to make much money at any specific time will start to seek status in other ways. It's only natural. It doesn't mean that people who seek status in material possessions or the experiences that money can buy are "wrong". They are just different.
You can sort-of have a situation were being poor is cool and provides a certain type of status, but if you dig deeper in 99.9% of the cases the person seeking status this way is not actually poor. He's just another middle class kid with the typical middle class neuroses. Or to be a bit crude: "Wankster, not Gangster." People who are actually poor have a different raft of problems and their own ways to seek status.
We all have a tendency to rationalise our personal predicaments. (IMHO this type of rationalisation is, on balance, healthy, but that's a separate debate). So for example a guy who is unathletic and arty will often become a hipster, rather than a jock. It is the best way he can compete in the world. And obviously the reverse is also true. The natural athletic guy becomes a jock or bodybuilder etc. And each will swear to high heaven that their way of gaining status is the "best" way or "the way of the future". And they are all wrong. Every last one of them. There are (more than) 101 ways to skin a cat.
So, someone who is not able to make much money at any specific time will start to seek status in other ways. It's only natural. It doesn't mean that people who seek status in material possessions or the experiences that money can buy are "wrong". They are just different.