STATUS ANXIETY
November 14, 2005

Some things to ponder about during our get-together...

There's something depressing about a Paul McCartney world tour -- not those
wonderful Beatles tunes, but the fact that McCartney still seems to need the
applause. Is it uncharitable to say that he should have outgrown it by now?

Why is it that we who enjoy lives of unparalleled prosperity are still
capable of feeling miserable?

But these days, well, put it this way: It's getting tougher and tougher to
blame one's failures on a lack of opportunity. There's a lot of it around.
That's the problem with a level playing field: Everyone gets to play on it,
not just you, and when they excel and you don't, there are certain
inescapable conclusions at hand, the principle one being, I am a loser.

Our failure is the outcome of our personal faults. We have less because we
don't deserve more.

De Botton tells us, "Status anxiety is the price we pay for acknowledging
that there is a public distinction between a successful and an unsuccessful
life."

Specifically, he gently forces us to evaluate our struggle for status: why we
want it, what it can give us if we attain it, what lurks behind the search
and what really drives us to want it at all.

Status is desirable because it proves that we are intelligent, hardworking,
talented and, therefore, lovable. We measure status by how much money a
person has, and by how much power that money demands. But, he asks, do that
money and power really translate to the love and acceptance we crave? Have we
achieved our goal, or have we replaced it? And what role does our consumer
culture play in all this? Do our new conveniences and technology make us more
fulfilled, or do they feed our anxiety?

Why do the successes of our peers drive us crazy?

This obsession with our place in society, de Botton writes, emerges from
several sources: our fear of lovelessness; inflated expectations about what
our lives should bring; our faith in meritocracy (which leads us to believe
that modern day academic achievement sorts everyone into their rightful
place), snobbery;


That shadow side of meritocracy, in short, was that those who got stuck at
the bottom would get the message, subliminally or overtly, that they had only
themselves to blame. And in a money-oriented society like ours, 90 percent of
us can't help but feel we're at or near the bottom.

"Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not
only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind."
Henry David Thoreau, “Walden” 1854

"Greed is good." Gordon Gecko, “Wall Street” 1987

Status anxiety is a relatively modern phenomenon: "For most of history ...
very few among the masses had ever aspired to wealth or fulfillment; the rest
knew well enough that they were condemned to exploitation and resignation."

Today, making money in and of itself is, of course, still held in high
esteem. As de Botton writes, "The ability to accumulate wealth is prized as
proof of the presence of at least four cardinal virtues: creativity, courage,
intelligence and stamina. ... Financial failures are judged to be similarly
merited, with unemployment's bearing some of the shame that physical
cowardice earned in warrior eras."

So, what's a poor boy -- and a status-hungry society -- to do?

In earlier times, things were simpler, you were born rich or poor and you
ended up, more or less, where you started. Lack of progress did not lose you
"status points"; there was a natural order, and the peasants could enjoy the
consoling dignity of labour or some such. Now we cleave to meritocracy, and
failure to get on might suggest inferiority. "To the injury of poverty," de
Botton writes, a meritocratic system adds "the insult of shame".

Status anxiety, he notes, produces competition, self-realisation and
excellence... Still, it makes you fret.

A recent survey suggested that office workers care more about their job
descriptions than how much they are paid. A significant percentage even
admitted that they would accept lower salaries if they were suitably promoted
in terms of their job title.

De Botton feels that we should try to expect less and thus be happier when we
don't get what we should not logically even want.

De Botton wants us to "focus on the significance of ordinary life", to look
at the tenets of Christianity and its multifarious defences against the
heresy that we are better or more honourable people simply because we are
richer. He advises us to embrace bohemianism of the Dadaist kind which
despises all bourgeois status totems as essentially bogus. He also sees a
true appreciation of art as a protection against status anxiety.

Alain de Botton invites us to consider the living conditions of a medieval
peasant and to ask if we're happier than he was.

For the peasant, things were pretty basic. He had a few acres of farmland
rented from his feudal lord. He owned practically nothing, apart from his
squalid rags, a donkey and perhaps a handful of chickens clucking merrily
around his potato patch.

Yet, spiritually, he was at peace, He accepted his lowly status implicitly.
It was all part of the natural order. God had ordained that he should till
the soil while his lord and master up at the castle stuffed his face with
honey-roast pheasant and helped himself to the nest local wenches.

The very narrowness of his expectations made the peasant content in a way
that modern man can never be. It didn't occur to him to cast aside his
plough, throw off his mud-caked smock and open a sushi bar or become a DJ.

We cannot console ourselves with the peasant's get-out clause, that life's
disappointments are down to the Almighty. For most of us, God has gone. We
must shoulder the blame ourselves.

A simple solution is to disregard your earthly status altogether and focus
your mind on the cold tomb towards which we are all speeding.

Aside from pure philosophy, de Botton advocates art as a cure for social
ills. Attending a performance of Sophocles's Oedipus reinforces our pity for
society's outcasts. Reading Flaubert's Madame Bovary makes us more forgiving
of promiscuity and debt. Listening to Bach's Mass in B Minor compels us to
recognise our mortality and insignificance.

"What annoys me about most self-help books is that they have no tragic sense.
They have no sense that life is fundamentally incomplete rather than
accidentally incomplete. I find a certain kind of pessimism consoling and
helpful. Part of fulfilment might be recognising how awful life is."

But status anxiety, he argues, can be cured—or at least mitigated—if we draw
upon the resources of philosophy, art, politics, religion, and bohemia as
tools for putting the issue in perspective. For example, we can curb our urge
to grasp after bigger, more impressive things and learn to appreciate our
mundane lives, he argues, by exposing ourselves to art and literature that
celebrates the beauty and dignity of the ordinary. Likewise, an understanding
of the ideals that drive Western religion can help us relinquish our fixation
on worldly success. And we could do worse, he suggests, than to heed the
observations of astute social critics like the eighteenth-century French
commentator Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort, who warned, "public opinion is
the worst of all."

excerpts from:

http://www.alaindebotton.com/status.htm