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I’ve just finished reading Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton. The book is divided into two sections. The first seeks to understand the causes of status anxiety, the idea “that we are in danger of failing to conform to the ideals of success laid down by society and that we may as a result be stripped of our dignity and respect”, whilst the second section discusses potential philosophical resolutions to this great dilemma.

At the outset, i must say, this is a beautifully written work. I found myself repeatedly rereading significant tracts of the text just to recapture the sheer eloquence of the exquisite prose. And if that were not enough, i found the ideas expressed through the book deeply thought provoking. In the remainder of this post i hope to provide an overview of a selection of these ideas, particularly as the relate to the causes of status anxiety.

In the opening pages de Botton notes that our status is heavily dependent upon the views of others:

If our position on the ladder [of social standing] is a matter of such concern, it is because our self-conception is so dependent upon what others make of us. Rare individuals aside, we rely on signs of respect from the world to feel tolerable to ourselves.

And yet, despite the relative importance of status, it is “hard to achieve and even harder to maintain over a lifetime”.

And from failure will flow humiliation: a corroding awareness that we have been unable to convince the world of our value and are henceforth condemned to consider the successful with bitterness and ourselves with shame.

de Botton argues that status is an off shoot of our desire for love. Status anxiety stems from our basic human need to be noticed and appreciated by the world, and money, fame, and other properties typically associated with high status, are not ends in themselves, but rather tokens that demonstrate to the world that we are somehow important.

The attention of others might be said to matter to us principally because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value - as a result of which what others think of us comes to play a determining role in how we are able to view ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.

Our ‘ego’ of self-conception could be pictured as a leaking balloon, forever requiring the helium of external love to remain inflated and vulnerable to even the smallest pinpricks of neglect.

In addition to lovelessness, snobbery (anyone practicing overt social or cultural bias) is also positioned as a primary cause of status anxiety. And yet, as de Botton brilliantly articulates:

Belittling others is no pastime for those convinced of their own standing. There is terror behind the haughtiness. It takes a punishing impression of our own inferiority to leave others feeling that they aren’t good enough for us.

A third proposed cause of status anxiety is expectation. The book suggests that the incredible advances in industry and technology over the past two centuries, although demonstrably reducing “actual deprivation may - paradoxically - have been accompanied by a continuing and even increased sense of deprivation and fear of it”. Or to state the problem in simple terms: the more others have, the more we feel we need to have. And how do we decided when we’ve got enough? As de Botton notes:

Our sense of an appropriate limit to anything - for example, to wealth or self esteem - is never decided independently. It is arrived at by comparing our condition with that of a reference group, with that of people we consider to be our equals.

I consider the latter part of the preceding sentence to be particularly important: we are much more likely to compare ourselves with our colleagues, neighbours, family and friends, than we are with those outside of our immediate social sphere. I am sure to be more envious at a close friend winning the lottery than i would be at Bill Gates amassing another million dollars.

It is the feeling that we might be something other than we are - a feeling transmitted by the superior achievements of those we take to be our equals - that generates anxiety and resentment.

It follows from this argument that “the more people we take to be our equals and compare ourselves to, the more people there will be to envy”. In this respect, the book suggests that the two ideals - now almost universal, but still relatively new in the history of humanity - that of equality and unlimited personal potential, are perhaps the two factors most significantly responsible for increasing levels of status anxiety. In past societies, founded on clear and non-permeable class divisions, a peasant living in great poverty accepted their condition as one of inevitability; it was their lot in life, allocated by God. They could not hope for anything more, and so they didn’t, and without the expectation of greater significance they were absolved of the burden of envy, subsequently enjoying surprisingly high levels of happiness in the midst of an incredibly hard life of thankless servitude. The peasant was not plagued by the gapping divide between the abundant wealth of the nobility or the clergy any more than i’m plagued by the abundant supply of playgirls at Hugh Hefner’s disposal; without expectation that we should or could be equal, there cannot be envy or disappointment. “When inequality is the general rule in society, the greatest inequalities attract no attention. But when everything is more or less level, the slightest variation is noticed”.

We live in a world where we are repeatedly told that anything is possible. If we harness our own personal wellspring of potential we can change the world. We are increasingly enchanted by the myth of self actualisation and teased by an onslaught of books and articles espousing the merits of unbounded personal development. And yet:

We are not always humiliated by failing at things; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement, and then do not reach it. Our goals determine what we will interpret as a triumph and what must count as a failure.

Our self-esteem in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and to do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities. This concept can be represented graphically as shown below:

This equation, put forward by a professor of psychology at Harvard University “illustrates how every rise in our levels of expectation entails a rise in the dangers of humiliation. What we understand to be normal is critical in determining our chances of happiness”.

The equation also suggests there are two means available for increasing self-esteem and happiness. We can achieve greater things, thereby boosting our success, or we can seek to reduce what we want to achieve. In this sense, the equation takes on a rather Buddhist slant, implying that suffering in the world is the result of desire; if we squash the desire, we in turn annihilate the suffering.

Unfortunately, reducing our aspirations is easier said than done. We live in a world where even to suggest a reduction of aspiration is deemed counter-intuitive. We are inundated with messages from the media politely informing us of how we owe it to ourselves to take immediate control of our mental, emotional, physical and financial destinies; each message subtly expanding our expectations of who and where we ought to be. And if that were not enough, we have built bridges across the great class divides that once separated the elite from the proletariat. We have been engulfed by a relentless stream of celebrity exposure that has allowed us to forge psychological connections with the famous to the point that alongside friends and family, they now serve as reference points against which we assess our own achievements.

Is it any surprise that women are plagued with self doubt when they discover, that unlike “everyone else”, they lead sex lives devoid of regular three hour sessions yielding never ending waves of multiple tantric orgasms? And what about us guys? Forever stripped of our dignity if we don’t sport a 6-pack, hold down a high powered job, and simultaneously represent a walking definition of metrosexuality. Ah yes, i am depressed….

A quotation in the book that i found particularly insightful was from The Affluent Society, written in 1958 by J.K. Galbraith:

People are poverty-stricken whenever their income, even if adequate for survival, falls markedly behind that of the community. Then they cannot have what the large community regards as the minimum necessary for decency; and they cannot wholly escape, therefore, the judgement of the larger community that they are indecent.

I must say, i’ve always been critical of people crying poor, appearing on shows like Today, Tonight complaining about low wages, high taxes, and an unfair society callously stripping them of the means to put food on the table… when the table without food sits next to a new wide screen plasma television with built-in digital tuner, recordable hard drive, and Blu-ray disk player. And yet, is it really that surprising that in a meritocratic society that favours those rolling in cash, that the underprivileged should be trying harder than most to establish a sense of worth in the eyes of the world? Food on the table may stop the growls of an empty stomach, but it doesn’t remove the even stronger ache that drives us to seek acceptance from the communities in which we live.

Unfortunately, our obsession for things fails to address the root cause of our anxieties, and although we may buy to forget our sorrows, paradoxically, “the quickest way to stop noticing something may be to buy it - just as the quickest way to stop appreciating a person may be to marry them”. We repeatedly ignore the universal truth that the burst of happiness that comes with a shiny new car or suave new outfit is short lived, and “soon after reaching the summit [of happiness] we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and despair”.

However, de Botton is quick to point out that our anxieties are not entirely without merit:

The hunger for status, like all appetites, can have its uses: spurring us to do justice to our talents, encouraging excellence, restraining us from harmful eccentricities and cementing members of society around a common value system.

The problem is not so much that we envy, but rather “that we should spend so much of our lives envying the wrong things”. In the words of French author Chamfort, “public opinion is the worst of all opinions”. To be blindly led by the expectations of society is almost certainly to be led down a never ending path of folly. In response, de Botton suggests:

We should halt the masochistic process whereby we seek the approval of people before we have asked ourselves whether their views deserve to be listened to.

It can be all too easy to pay out on those around us that have become slaves to mindless public opinion. I caught a snippet of a current affairs program on television last night that, with an apparent sense of pride, provided viewers with a great tip for living an extravagant lifestyle on the cheap: rental. Case in point: instead of buying a pair of fashionable new shoes at $895, you can rent them for $90 a week. A lady in her early twenties, interviewed on the program, said with wild glee that she followed all the celebrity fashions, and that this “new technique” of fashion rental had delivered significant savings. My initial thought was “what a tosser”. This was quickly followed by “how shameful and debilitating”. How could she admit to spending ridiculous sums of money on clothing and accessories, not because she needs them, not because she likes them, not even because they were recommended to her by a trusted source, but simply because a “somebody”, a person that she doesn’t even know, is seen wearing them. And then i remembered a quote from de Botton imploring a different attitude:

Before mocking anyone who bought such a piece, it would perhaps be fairer to wonder about the wider context in which this kind of [item] was made and consumed. Rather than teasing the buyers, we may blame the society in which [we] live for setting up a situation where the purchase of [items for the sake of fashion] felt psychologically necessary and rewarding.

One final point touched upon in the book, a point that resonated with me last night as i walked through a new housing development within my suburb and observed how each new monstrous dwelling attempted to outshine its neighbour, is the idea that:

Citizens may lose some of their ambitions for personal glory when the public spaces and facilities of a city are glorious to behold. Simply being an ordinary citizen can seem like an adequate destiny.

I wondered whether the eruption of ghastly private architecture, whereby each family attempts to build a modern day Taj Mahal on a block appropriately sized for little more than a portaloo, is in some sense a reflection that in the past five years Canberra has lost much of its sheen as a picturesque city-country town hybrid, and instead rapidly swollen into a congested hectic hub typical of most other large cities. Perhaps the loss of public aesthetic has driven people inside their own private palaces.

Although i haven’t really touched upon the second half of the book which focuses on solutions to the problem of status anxiety, i have noticed that a number of reviewers have criticised de Botton for his rather simplistic and limited treatment of his “remedies”. However, it is worth keeping in mind two points. Firstly, as recorded in the preface to the book, de Botton notes “that the most profitable way of addressing the condition [of status anxiety] may be to attempt to understand and to speak of it”. In other words, the first section of the book, with its erudite discussion on our yearning for status and its root causes, may be considered as much a solution to the issue as the remedies specifically addressed in the second section of the book. Secondly, the solution chapters of philosophy, art, politics, christianity and bohemia (a chapter is offered to each), are not intended to be some kind of categorial panacea, but rather aim to present a broad brush stroke view of some of the methods adopted by the Western world, in particular, in response to the pressures of status anxiety. To this end, de Botton has been greatly successful.

In summary, this is an excellent book. Beautifully penned, and refreshingly profound, Status Anxiety is a pleasure to read, and not surprisingly, comes highly recommended.