A lot of human behavior starts to make sense once you're familiar with the idea of costly signaling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_principle https://e

A lot of human behavior starts to make sense once you're familiar with the idea of costly signaling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_principle Competing in endurance sports, owning expensive cars, and being able to speak intelligently about art or literature are all signals about your personality, wealth, class, and/or intelligence which are hard to fake.