I think you are very close to identifying what is the free energy principal at work. The FEP more or less says all living things and all systems of living things, are motivated to mimise the uncertainty of their own energy supply
Most living things are at least a collection of living cells, so we ourselves are systems of living things, and the collective of us is a system of systems, and so goes for all of nature, all of life.
The energy we are motivated to seek certainty of, is the energy we each need to metabolise, about 150 Joules per second (150 Watts) according to the Food and Administration study "Human Energy Requirements" which has recently been removed from public availabilty vis its own public website being recently withdrawn, in favor of reducing it only to a book, which can't even be found by searching for it by title, which does not help you get to the bottom of this question you rightly seem to be seeking the answer to.
Yet that information is not easy to obtain, it was a very expensive non profit study of people in all circumstances from all walks of life around the world, which I think would be more or less impossible to mount now, given the way things have gone, nothing but things which make profit get funded now.
Anyhow, that gripe aside, it is clear from the study that our individual demand for energy can vary from less than a hundred Watts to more than six hundred Watts at a push, when in highly stressed exercise mode, ie fight or flight.
So it's more or less impossible to know what our demand will be in advance.
Hence why we amass money. Money is how most of us get the supply of food we use to feed our energy requirement via food. So money is energy, also evident because money always has energy value per KWhrs in markets.
We don't know how much money to amass, all we know is the more the better. This is how we reduce uncertainty of energy supply.
The more money we have, the less the uncertainty of energy supply.
Alternatives only exist in the case of safety nets like UBI. This is why UBI is required, it reduces or completely removes our need to be always scrabbling around for more energy, more money.
It follows that seeking status then, is really about assuring certainty of energy supply. You know monarchs get pretty much free energy guaranteed, and why any threat to that historically, like the subjects rebelling or whatever, threatening the certainty of energy supply of the elites is punishable usually by horrible death, to set example right?
Being a high profile personality on social media assures a certain supply of energy via money. This explains your concern over it I think.
Selling ourselves, under all circumstances, as well as passing exams, and interviews, is a requirement to ensure we don't become social parias etc.
Add the time we spend thinking about that to the time we spend thinking about explicitly budgeting money, counting pennies etc, or how to make more of it, where our next job will come from etc, and it all adds up to an awful lot more maybe than we can perceive, we might even be in danger of energy bankrupting ourselves by thinking too much about the reason why, because after all, time is money, and nothing is for nothing in the old world of all energy available requiring hard work to get, right?
But you are very nearly on to this, I hope you see it.
The only reason I know it already before you is I am a long practiced Systems Engineer and this kind of reasoning, backed up by formal modelling languages and simulation, is an area of Systems Engineering called "Stakeholder analysis".
In essence it's about establishing motivation, driven by concerns, the concerns of all stakeholders including non human, since we need designed systems and / or systems we need to conform with, to meet all stakeholder concerns, where all of this is testable in a way we can show the delivered system meets all concerns, therefore has been successfully delivered.
In effect, *Human Energy Requirements" is exactly the kind of information we need to design or otherwise produce and deliver a system meeting those requirements.
Its also the information we would use to check that the system in use continues to meet those requirements. That's why it's so crazy the information has been almost deleted, off the cuff, because it didn't make any profit for anyone, not even enough to pay for the server resources hosting it as its own browsable website.
We are busy deleting vital information we need to live, all for profit.
And yet profit itself is an energy lie, the same energy lie which is behind all the increase of entropy, this the temperature rise, all the destruction, even all the genocide.
I hope you see how all this fits together, and even how it is devaluing money, in a way that the elites can never stop, not due to any individual, there are forces of nature at work which are physically removing the energy value from money until they start to issue it as solar indexed stimulus, removing all our concerns of energy certainty whilst releasing us, all of us including them, from the energy slavery loop we've practiced for thousands of years, since it is becoming increasingly unfit for purpose, more than it ever was, if that purpose was to deliver minimum human energy requirements, it is progressively failing, more and more miserably.