As always, Steven, I find your elaboration rather eloquent and relatable. Especially how you chose "snobbery" as an example.

I think snobbery is a particularly annoying phenomenon because it's a vain way to measure the worth of human beings (although I'm also guilty of it sometimes).

I've also been thinking deeply about comparison recently (in fact, I've just published a piece about it).

The way I see it, comparison breeds dangerous emotions such as envy and schadenfreude. Humans (I'm no exception) are way too prone to these vices, often at the cost of their own happiness.

As you wrote, one way to mitigate this is to put intrinsic value in higher regard compared to status value. A difficult task, perhaps, but it's certainly worthwhile.