Talk to Status Anxiety like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
Status Anxiety is Alain de Botton's 2004 examination of why modern people are so consumed with their standing in others' eyes, and what philosophy, art, and history can offer as remedies. The anxiety de Botton describes is specific: not fear of poverty or violence, but the particular dread of being thought poorly of by one's peers, of failing to achieve the social position one has come to feel entitled to, of being seen as a nobody. He argues this is one of the defining anxieties of modern life, rarely discussed honestly and largely unaddressed by conventional self-improvement.
The first half of the book — the diagnosis — identifies five sources of status anxiety: lovelessness (the desire for approval is effectively the desire to be loved, and most of us never feel sufficiently loved by the world); snobbery (the meritocratic ideal creates a world where low status implies personal failure, not just bad luck); expectation (modern people compare themselves not to medieval peasants but to successful contemporaries, and television and advertising have expanded the comparison group globally); meritocracy (the flip side of the inspiring notion that anyone can succeed is the implication that those who fail deserve to); and dependence (our sense of self is hostage to the opinions of others whose judgments are arbitrary and changeable).
What it gets right
- 1.
Status anxiety is the fear of being thought poorly of by peers and of failing to achieve the social position one has come to expect. It is distinct from material deprivation and has grown worse as meritocratic ideology has spread.
- 2.
Lovelessness is at the root of status anxiety. The drive for status is substantially a drive to be loved and respected, and most of us never feel sufficiently loved by the world.
- 3.
Meritocracy is a double-edged idea. The inspiring claim that anyone can succeed implies that anyone who fails deserved to. This is what makes low status feel so personally devastating in a meritocratic society.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Alain de Botton is a Swiss-British philosopher and author based in London. He writes accessible books that apply philosophical ideas to practical life, covering topics from architecture and travel to work, love, and religion. His other works include The Architecture of Happiness, The Art of Travel, How Proust Can Change Your Life, and Religion for Atheists. He founded The School of Life, an organization that applies therapeutic and philosophical thinking to everyday challenges. De Botton is known for writing philosophy as a literary genre — lucid, essayistic, and more interested in illuminating experience than advancing academic arguments.
