Being Popular vs Social Status: Why Society is Obsessed with Being Liked

I wonder if popularity in high school follows a normal distribution, similar to IQ or say athletic ability.

If so, 5% of people felt they were popular in high school. That's 2 standard deviations from the norm, or an equivalent IQ of 125. So, a kind of popularity genius in a way. It makes sense that they would be toxic to other people, in a similar way to how high IQ people may not be able to relate well with others. High IQ, gifted people seem to fundamentally think differently than others, so I wonder if these high popularity / status seekers similarly are fundamentally different kind of people.

Perhaps some people are more attuned to popularity or value it more than others. In high-school, I don't think I was even aware of popularity as something to be valued (perhaps explaining why I wasn't popular). Whereas I did value academic and athletic achievement. Like getting A's and winning matches were really important, but how popular wasn't even on my radar.

It makes sense with my experience in the working world. Status seeking bosses tended to be really toxic to work for and indeed, employees generally weren't as invested in their work. But perhaps it was so toxic for me, because I wasn't a status seeking person and thus my values diverged.

So, the question now is, given these insights and theories, does one adjust to become more like them, more status seeking (if that's even possible, perhaps it's a genetic thing) or avoid status seeking people.

I think in general, I tend to find popular status seekers off-putting, annoying unempathetic unintelligent unethical, but perhaps it's because I value opposite things like empathy intelligence ethics, etc... Those seem to be intermediate factors though. What exactly is primary to popularity and status seeking in terms of skills and values?

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interesting comment. the exact wording was "seeking status based popularity is toxic," 

not necessarily that high status is "toxic." that is, status based popularity vs. likeability based popularity.

Prinstein's theory is that likeability based popularity is better. Perhaps, likeability involves cooperative social skills, whereas status seeking is more competitive.