In all primates, and of course humans, all this is primarily governed by Social Status [SS]( = hierarchy position, rank, "pecking order").
SS is what humans are effectively after:
A higher SS brings access to more resources and mates; conversely, too, more resources and (more or better) mates leads to higher SS.
So, in humans, SS is the true name of the social game, the social war (for resources and mates, for SS).
Politics is the battleground of individuals and groups that decides about who has higher or lower SS.
[SPOILER]
SS is no matter of mere vanity. Higher SS consistently is correlated with higher health span and life span. This, very counter-intuitively, has no solely economic reasons. In the past, it was thought that people of lower classes/SS were more diseased and died sooner because of economic deprivation (less good food, less healthcare, worse environment etc.). This idea made sense in the past, because indeed this causes poor outcomes. But it turned out that economic deprivation is a completely independent cause! Even after economic redistribution, that is, after access to good food, healthy environment and healthcare for everybody, the SS advantage in health- and lifespan persisted!
First doubts were had when studies on British rail workers were done; around 12000 of them were studied in a longitudinal (observe what happens over time) health study.
Rail workers in the 60s were poor - they did not eat as much as they would have liked. They had to work physically in the open (replacing rails and rail switches, walking for miles checking the rails every day and so on).
Medicine, on average, can prove statistically what is good for health:
1. Avoid being overweight.
2. Do not smoke and drink much alcohol.
3. Eat healthy food (vegetables and so on).
4. Exercise regularly.
Those rail workers should have enjoyed good health, because they had not much money (= -1- avoided obesity, -3- ate many (cheap) vegetables; -2- lacked money for much tobacco and alcohol; -4- through their work, got copious amounts of regular exercise in fresh air).
Now the paradox happened:
Some, a few hundreds, of those rail workers got promoted to foreman. They got higher wages, and they got a nice, warm foreman's office to sit in. This resulted in:
1A. They consumed more (tasty, energy-dense) food. They got fat.
2A. They consumed much more tobacco and drinks.
3A. Vegetables were largely removed from their diet, instead they ate more sweets and other tasty things.
4A. Instead of regular exercise, they sat all year in their offices, living a mostly sedentary lifestyle.
What happened to them? Medical theory would predict that they should be more diseased and live shorter lives than those who were not promoted.
The opposite happened: The foremen, strikingly, most significantly turned out to be much healthier (much lower frequency of cancers, heart attacks etc.), lived significantly longer, and enjoyed a significant slower cognitive decline with age, compared to the non-promoted rail workers!
The points 1,2,3,4 still held to be true - on average, over the whole population, as predictors of superior health and life span outcomes.
However, the effect of SS turned out to be a much more powerful as a predictor!
Scientists got interested in this SS phenomenon and thought about how to demonstrate/proof a direct relationship of SS for health outcomes, unrelated to economic class.
This would require a population to study which is economically equal, but still experiences SS-dynamics. Such populations/societies were found  - in some local tribes in New Guinea, and in the South American Yanomami people: In their society, economic distribution for everybody is quite perfectly equal. Nobody enjoyed advantages (or suffered disadvantages) in access to food, material goods, personal care during illness or high age or living conditions - their existence could be called being somewhat like a "proto-communism".
But, as in any known human society, they had a strong system governing SS. Their SS depended on two factors:
Success in war (inter-tribal local warfare) and  success in hunting. The advantages of those with high SS merely consisted in a higher-status position in  the order of sitting in their communal house;
no economic benefit was connected with this. Those with this higher SS had the privilege of higher "face", as they called it, which meant that their publicly stated opinions during tribal meetings weighed more. And they enjoyed more sexual access - in a non-enforced way (they were simply more favored): Women wanted to just have more sex with such men, who then also fathered more offspring.
Here scientists studied the effects of SS.
Success in war and hunting fluctuated, and so did individual SS - some men gained SS, some men lost it (over months and years).
The scientists measured health variables (inflammation markers, C-reactive protein, blood pressure, incidence and duration of infections, cortisol level, white blood cell count, and  more) over time in parallel to the SS.
It turned out that those who rose into high SS achieved improvements in health markers (and health, obviously), while those who suffered a decrease in or permanent low SS showed a prolonged stress response (higher cortisol level) and were more prone to disease.
This proved that SS as variable in humans is an independent, and one of the strongest, predictor of health and life span in humans.
Because we are ~98,5% genetically identical with other primates, especially chimps, there was follow-up research on chimp health and chimp SS, which essentially yielded the same results.
Later more and more evidence was produced, for example a longitudinal study in human bureaucrats/government officials: Life and health span was found to be an almost perfectly linear relationship to SS:
The gatekeeper was off worst, then clerks and higher-ranked clerks, then the deputy directors, and on top with the best health outcomes the directors.
SS is an independent, and fascinatingly powerful predictor of health- and life span.
High SS = high social power = low stress
(Stress exists in two forms: As an emergency response to threats - fights, accidents, challenges - hormones are released to down-regulate digestion, sexual function, certain higher-order brain processes,
detoxification (liver, kidneys) and immune function - none of this is needed by an organism in an emergency situation, but all available energy must be available for a fight-or-flight response. This is very beneficial for survival when the emergency situation is only of short duration. However, chronic stress is different: Here, the emergency (or the subjective interpretation of a situation to be so) is prolonged - and this is why chronic stress is so destructive to health- and life span - chronically elevated levels of stress hormones (cortisol, adrenalin, ...) down-regulate all the functions above for a long time - and this causes much more frequent diseases and earlier deaths.)
High SS  in humans causes low stress, a relaxation response ("I am safe and powerful.")
Low SS  in humans causes high stress, and an anxiety response ("I am not in control and subject to others, my existence is unsafe.")
This insight helps to explain some seemingly statistical exceptions, for example:
Winston Churchill: Heavy smoker, "no sports", legendary, almost unbelievably heavy drinker, obese. Lived to age 90 in good mental and physical health.
Helmut Schmidt (German chancellor): Heavy smoker for at least half a century until his death, on average 40 cigarettes per day, lived to age 96 in good mental and physical health.
Both enjoyed supreme levels of SS, both had very unhealthy habits, but both lived long and prospered.