What he's saying is if there are 100 people, and you go from #50 most prestigious member to #49, you just displaced someone else in the hierarchy.

It has nothing to do with relationships.

But there aren't 100 people, there are 8.1 billion of us. If your relationships are such that the only way for me to be a winner is for you to be a loser, when we can both be winners, it's sad.

If it's a closed system, like a race, then that makes sense. Only one person can finish first. But life's not a closed system like that, so I can win at the races and you can win at the slots, and we can go for a nice dinner together. Maybe a bit pollyanna, but not everything has to be a competition. My happiness doesn't come from the expense of someone else's.

This implies there’s a strict, singular and universal ordering for prestige.

The idea you can rank prestige like that, and displace anyone in a strict manner, or that there’s some metric you can even use, is utter nonsense.

There are bands, of course, but nothing more granular than that.

It’s not a zero sum game unless you’re in a very unhealthy mindset.

You really missed the point of my comment. I am blessed with an abundance of healthy relationships. But for society as a whole, status only exists on a relative scale. The slope of the curve may differ but most people are striving to move up that curve.