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I think your framing of the doctor/lawyer vs. building porter choice contains a hidden assumption worth examining, that this is actually a choice available to most people.
For the median building porter, "successful doctor, lawyer, or business executive" was likely never on the menu. The choice wasn't between high-status career + 2 kids versus low-status career + 4 kids. The realistic choice set was always constrained by cognitive ability, conscientiousness, family resources, and other human capital factors. The hypothetical only feels like a meaningful trade-off for people in roughly the 115+ IQ range with adequate executive function, maybe 15% of the population. For everyone else, the actual revealed preference is more telling. Given their realistic options, many still choose smaller families. This suggests status-seeking has become decoupled from its evolutionary function.
You're right that status motivation runs deep, but it's worth noting why it runs deep evolutionarily. For men, status-seeking is largely instrumental, it's the primary mechanism for attracting mates.
The Vox Day socio-sexual hierarchy (sigma/alpha/beta/gamma/etc.) captures this, there's a cohort of men who pursue visible status markers specifically as mating strategy, while others (the "sigma" archetype) achieve reproductive success through different pathways.
In an environment where status no longer reliably converts to reproductive success (because high-status people have fewer children), what exactly is being optimized for?
The drive persists, but it's become maladaptive, a stimulus disconnected from its original function.
Women competing for status in traditionally male professional hierarchies, is arguably doubly maladaptive. Professional status competition directly trades against peak fertility years. The opportunity cost is measured in children never born.
Unlike male status, female professional status doesn't meaningfully increase attractiveness to potential mates, and may actively reduce the pool of acceptable partners (since female hypergamy means high-status women often won't "marry down").
Women in this track pay the fertility cost that men pay, without receiving the mate-attraction benefit that men receive. They're running on hardware optimized for a different game.
This is why the Haredi example is so instructive. They've maintained a status system where large families are the status signal, aligning the status drive with rather than against reproductive fitness. It's not that they've suppressed the desire for status; they've just pointed it in a direction that doesn't defeat its own evolutionary purpose.
The secular West has essentially created a status game that selects against the players most committed to playing it.
I agree, which is why men going to actual productive jobs might seriously undermine the system. It's also worth noting that part of the Haredi "success" is likely to be in their genes. They seem to be okay with a life which, for most people, would be pretty miserable.
I like the idea of being reproductively successful, but there's a lot of things I would not do in order to achieve that success: Sexually assaulting someone; going to jail; lying to a woman in order to get her pregnant; etc. And that probably includes devoting my life to full time religious study.
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