Book Summary — Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton
Do you worry about how well you are doing? Are you envious of your friends’ success? Are you suffering from status anxiety?
Those were the words that drew me to pick up this book in a random shelf at the Central Library. Growing up in a competitive meritocracy in Singapore, life was a constant creeping worry about whether I was measuring up to my peers.
Was I studying hard enough? Was I earning enough? If I wasn’t, was I good enough? I was intrigued that the author named the condition Status Anxiety and hoped to deepen my understanding of it. Perhaps if I could understand, I could let go of this constant fear of coming up short.
The author identifies 5 causes for status anxiety, mainly: lovelessness, snobbery, expectation, meritocracy and dependence.
1. We want to be loved
The author writes:
To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern. Our presence is noted, our views listened to, our failings treated with indulgence and our needs ministered to.
Because our sense of identity is held captive by the judgments of those we live among, we are anxious about the place we hold in the world. We are fearful that if we are not good enough, we won’t be loved. To be ignored disappoints the most ardent desires of human nature.
2. We don’t want to be looked down upon by snobs
Our fear of not being loved is compounded by the presence of snobs in society, who equate social rank with human worth. Without socially recognized achievements, we are ignored and looked down upon by them, a far cry from the unconditional love we experienced as children.
Interestingly, being neglected also fosters a huger within us to gain the attention of our neglectors. Therefore, the snobbery of a prominent group can direct our attention towards ambitions that we previously had no care for, but now pursue as the only apparent means to love and recognition.
Instead of trying to prove them wrong, the author encourages us to cultivate empathy towards the snobbish, writing:
Belittling others is no past time for those convinced of their own standing. It takes a punishing impression of our own inferiority to leave others feeling that they aren’t good enough for us.
Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury can be read as a record of emotional trauma; people who felt so scared of suffering the disdain of others that they felt a need to add an extraordinary amount to themselves to signal that they too could be loved.
3. We have high expectations of life
In the past, inequality was seen as fair and the natural order of the world. To challenge why certain people were condemned to till the soil while others feasted in banquet halls was to challenge the creator’s will.
Therefore, even though they lacked the means to achieve material equality, men’s souls were not degraded.
The author argues that while the great consumer revolution brought about many goods that improved our standards of living, it also caused much psychological anguish in that it continually raised our expectations in two areas:
- Material goods
How much is enough? While an increase in the production of material goods (clothes, cars, houses, food) may have led to a decline in deprivation, it may also have ironically led to an increased sense of people feeling like they don’t have enough.
The author writes that our sense of ‘enough’ is never decided independently but by comparing our condition with people we consider to be our equals. If we have as much, or more than them, we consider ourselves fortunate.
- Ambition
The consumer revolution also founded a belief that any man can launch himself to a great career and feel he has been called to a noble destiny.
This is a delusion fueled by self-help books and self-made millionaires and subscribed to by many; which experience quickly corrects, leading to anguish. The author cites William James’ equation:
It is not failure that humiliates us. We are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.
In sum, modern society is extremely good at keeping a permanent gap between what we want and what we can afford, who we are and who we might be.
It is this gap — the feeling that we might be something better, amplified by the superior achievements of those we take to be our equals, that generates anxiety and resentment.
Yet, expectation is at the heart of progress? To which one might argue: is progress essential? For me, the author raises a thought provoking question here: Who is more deprived? The pre-industrial revolution man or the modern man?
4. In meritocracy, our status denotes how good a person we are
In a shift from aristocracy (where your station in life was largely determined by birth) to meritocracy (determined by your own abilities), low status took on a moral connotation.
If you couldn’t do well despite having fair and equal opportunities to succeed, then it must mean something is lacking in you. In this belief, the rich were not only wealthier, but also plain better.
If the successful merited their success, then failures had to merit their failure. Low status is no longer regrettable like it was in the past, but deserved. The question became: If you are really good, clever or able, why are you poor?
The author writes poignantly:
To the injury of poverty, a meritocratic system now added the insult of shame
5. There are many things outside our control
Our status now hangs on our performance in a fast-moving, uncertain and changing economy. Yet our performance itself is uncertain because:
- We cannot summon our talents to the fore at will
- Success has an element of luck to it
- The priorities of our employer determines our status and progression
- We depend on our employer’s profitability in a VUCA world for a job
How can we overcome these worries then? The author suggests 5 ways: philosophy, art, politics, Christianity and Bohemia.
1. Rationally examine the opinions of others
Can we really take the opinions of others so seriously? The author cites the point of several philosophers that public opinion can sometimes be the worst opinion because it has mass appeal and is thus, not subjected to rigour of thinking.
In considering the opinions of others towards us, we should ask: is it damning and is it true? Only when rational examination reveals it to be both should we allow it to shatter our esteem.
While feeling anxious can help us find safety and develop our talents, our emotions can often push us towards indulgence, anger and self-destruction. Philosophers argue for a golden mean we should aim towards, with the help of reason.
This is the gray space between the polarities; for example, between cowardice and rashness, there is courage. Between status lethargy and status hysteria, there is ambition.
2. Art can help rebalance our moral perspective
Art is the criticism of life. Great artists always seek to express their hopes for a better world through their art.
Works of art (plays, novels, paintings, etc) can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They act as guides to a truer, more intelligent understanding of the world.
In viewing art, we can nurture our capacity for empathy or rebalance our moral perspective through a few ways:
- Countering snobbery
For example, society has a habit of mostly recognising the best in people who have external achievements that can hold our fleeting attention. Yet there are many good people who would never have an epic life due to circumstances. The author cites George Eliot:
The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.
- Recognizing the flaws of ourselves
In reading novels and the complexity of their characters, we can begin to see how given certain circumstances, we too may fall into mistakes like adultery or murder.
This helps us get off our high horse of judgment and cultivates sympathy and tolerance. It helps us abandon ordinary life’s simplified perspective that life is black and white but instead, shades of grey. Who are we to judge if we are imperfect ourselves?
3. Become aware of a gigantic distortion in priorities
Every society holds certain kinds of people in high esteem and because this is constantly changing, so too will status anxiety.
Modern society values people with money. We see having money as indicating the virtue of its owner and demonstrating values of creativity, courage, intelligence and stamina; downplaying the role that chance played in our success.
Therefore, the possession of material goods has also evolved to not only give pleasure but confer honour. The logic goes that: if you can afford a boat, then surely you must be an honourable person by extension?
Taken to the other extreme, many things have also become necessities for a person to be deemed honourable. For example, if you can’t afford a nice shirt, then surely you must be less virtuous?
We are trained to think that material accumulation should be our priority because it helps us be satisfied, distracting us from correctly tracing our other priorities.
4. Spirituality helps us consider a dual view of life
Religion provides for a dual view of a good life in one’s earthly and spiritual status, thus offering a way out of an oppressive one dimensional way of success. In this view, it is possible for one to be spiritually rich but earthly poor and that poverty could co-exist with goodness.
The thought of death can be a solemn call to determine our priorities and guide us to a truer, more significant way of life away from status. Time and death gives us perspective of our own insignificance, stripping away our exaggerated sense of importance for our projects and concerns.
It gives us clarity in asking the questions that matter:
- What can withstand an erosion of our standing?
- Why do other’s opinions of us matter?
Perhaps something in us recognises how closely our miseries are bound with the grandiosity of our ambitions. The author writes:
We can overcome a feeling of unimportance not by making ourselves more important but by recognizing the relative unimportance of everyone.
The more we judge ordinary people to be inferior, the more we wish to distinguish ourselves from them, propelling our status anxiety.
If we can appreciate the preciousness of each human being, then the notion of being ordinary sheds its darker associations and the desire to triumph or compete to distinguish ourselves will weaken.
5. Embrace a bohemian lifestyle
In the Bohemian culture, status is more likely to be earned through an inspired conversational style or the authorship of an intelligent, heartfelt volume of poetry instead of material success and public reputation.
Bohemians tend to break away from convention and sometimes like Henry Thoreau, move away from society to pursue an outwardly plain but inwardly rich existence.
