Status Anxiety [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Alain de Botton (AdB) has written another book in his trademark witty, erudite style, kind of like a Woody Allen with a classical education. This time, his topic is the quest for social status. He probes the causes, and explores various prescriptions taken from philosophy, art, politics, religion, and bohemia to sooth our fears. He uses historical examples, from Tocqueville to Tony Robbins, to help us keep perspective and to sooth our anxieties.

I thought this was enjoyable summer reading, though not profound or complete by any means - although it was not meant to be. Also, some of AdB's other books are slightly better, so if this is the first book by AdB you want to read, I'd recommend "How Proust can Change your Life" first. But if the topic intrigues you, as it did me, then by all means give this book a try.

A summary of the topics covered is below:

First, AdB begins by claiming that it's human nature that we want to be a "somebody" rather than a "nobody," and to rise rather than fall or remain at too modest a rung on the social latter. This hunger for status can indeed drive us to achieve - but it also leads to a kind of restlessness characteristic of free, meritocratic societies. In contrast, there was no such anxiety in the Medieval caste system, because ones social status was fixed for life.

One root cause of our anxiety, AdB claims, is that our egos are forever leaky balloons forever requiring helium of recognition and love, but always vulnerable to pinpricks. The prescription: Don't take others evaluation too seriously - after all, "does an emerald become worse if it isn't praised?" Also, remember that the views of the masses are often perforated with confusion and error, relying on intuition, emotion, and custom rather than rationality. As Voltaire says, "the earth swarms with people who are not worth talking to"

Also, one must realize that the determinants of high status continually shift. For example, Spartans prized aggressive warriors; the Cubeo tribe in the Amazon prized those who killed jaguars. In contrast, peaceful saints were idolized in Medieval Europe, as were "gentlemen" in industrial England. Today, commercial success is our measuring stick - money signals success. But that definition also ties us to some new and unpredictable forces, such as our employer's success, flux in the global economy, and. technological change.

By using money as today's yardstick, we have sorely forgotten that cash and material goods are not the sole measure of a person's worth. In contrast, Bohemians, who devoted themselves to art and the intellect rather than material success, thought that those who achieved material success in society were those who pandered most effectively to the flawed values of their audiences. AdB also quotes Montaigne to remind us that we must evaluate people through a different lens: "A man may have a great suite of attendants, a beautiful palace, great influence, and a large income. All that may surround him, but it is not *in* him...What sort of soul does he have?"

Another cause of our status anxiety is our own high expectations. Wealth is relative to desire, and in an age of seemingly limitless expectations and material goods, we are weighed down by the limits of economics and reality, which yields permanent distress. We are also quietly influenced by our peers, advertising, and other outside forces that shape our desires rather than listening to our own souls. We also "mis-want" - that is, we think new products will make us happier than they actually will. The prescription is that if we must continue to long for things, we must take care to long for the right things, and tune into our own true desires.

Finally, envy can be cured by realizing that anyone's achievements seem insignificant in the context of the millennia and the expansive wonders of nature. Also, we should always keep in mind that at the end of one's days, the value of love, true friends, and charity will outweigh the quest for power, wealth, status and glory.

An excellent book.

The writer highlights the typical pattern that people adopt to live out their lives. We each try to acquire status in the eyes of others in order to gain their approval/the love of the world. In the modern world, that process has mainly turned us into wealth-seekers as a matter of course, who embark on a lengthy exercise of amassing far more wealth and possessions than we actually need, in order to try to show ourselves to be `worthy' and `winners' in the eyes of others, and because we fear the alternative interpretations of us (e.g. `losers' or `nobodies') should we fail to achieve. Yet those who achieve aren't necessarily the 'best' people, nor particularly `worthy' anyway; wealth is rather absurdly treated in modern society as the mark of a quality person when it may often be well wide of the mark; and the fact that each of us is going to die anyway ought arguably to make us spend less time accumulating wealth, at least once we have amassed enough wealth to see out our days in reasonable comfort. What we are engaging in is in fact an odd and often excessive and unnecessary social dance, a struggle onwards and upwards to acquire status, which, if we reflected more upon it, we might choose not to engage in, at least to the full extent that we do.

The writer highlights alternative ways of living instead of a life of perpetual status seeking in order to convince others of our worth. We are not automatically condemned to live as unthinking status-seekers: we have rational choice in the matter and can shun the conventional pattern of behaviour should we wish. We could adopt Rousseau's idea of lowering our expectations of what we should be getting from life, and be happy with less: indeed, we may find ourselves happier by abandoning excessive patterns of wealth-seeking altogether. Or we could adopt a Christian ideal. Or we could become bohemians, rebelling against the bourgeoisie and against modern consumerism and living far more simply, on little, but enjoying life more by doing so. Or we could do something else, by which we may be poorer but happier through our own sensible choices in a modern world that is difficult to negotiate anyway.

Importantly, the writer reminds us (applying principles of living advocated by Marcus Aurelius, among others) that the best person to judge a person is that person, and that if a person knows he is leading a sufficiently good life which is satisfactory to himself and that he is doing his best whatever the outcome, then the judgments and opinions of others - who don't know the full detail about his life anyway and may well be wide of the mark - and the status they choose to confer on that individual can rationally be dismissed as being of little or no importance. We might therefore more usefully live lives which please ourselves, and set our own standards for ourselves, rather than trying to live in ways we would prefer not to, merely in order to impress or satisfy or please others or convince them that we are among the 'best' people through displays of status and status symbols.

This is an amusing, cynical, enlightening, simply written, easily understandable, and thought-provoking book. A book that will make you re-examine how you live. A book that should be read by every adult, to help them understand the processes in the world more clearly.

5/5

The skill of Swiss-born Alain de Botton lies in his ability to peel back the layers of complexity surrounding human relationships and lay bare the kernel. In "Status Anxiety" he looks for the source of modern angst-not to mention obsession-about our social rank. In particular, he examines the stories we tell ourselves to explain the righteousness of our situation and how those stories affect our happiness.

De Botton looks back at a time long ago when peasants led a far harsher existence in material terms, but rarely worried that their difficulties were "their own fault." Thus had God made the world, and such were the affairs of men supposed to be. When we could not improve our social rank or material worth, there was no tendency to confuse riches with saintliness.

Starting from that idealized Rousseau-esque time, the author follows changing ideas about personal rights and responsibilities and finds a distinct downside to the whole concept of Western meritocracy. If we can be anything we want to be, our current relative lack of wealth, power, beauty and fame must be our own fault. No longer able to blame God, bad luck or the stars for misfortune, we see the world split into winners (virtuous, hard-working and strong) and losers (evil, lazy and weak). Where we once understood the complexity and frailty of human existence, we now see the world in terms of newspaper headlines: "Oedipus the King: Royal in Incest Shocker."

Finally, "Status Anxiety" looks at some of the ways that modern humans have tried to escape this social trap. It considers both bohemian and Christian philosophies and finds merits in both, if notably fewer in bohemianism. Ultimately, the book concludes, if our current set of values offers true happiness and contentment to only an elite minority, the democratic solution is to change those values. De Botton's contribution to that end is this book.