Status anxiety (or the anxiety for the lack of)

Alain de Botton (2004), in Status Anxiety:

A mature solution to status anxiety may be said to begin with the recognition that status is available from, and awarded by, a variety of different audiences… and that our choice among them may be free and willed.

However unpleasant anxieties over status may be, it is difficult to imagine a good life entirely free of them, for the fear of failing and disgracing oneself in the eyes of others is an inevitable consequence of harbouring ambitions, of favouring one set of outcomes over another and of having regard for individuals besides oneself. Status anxiety is the price we pay for acknowledging that there is a public distinction between a successful and an unsuccessful life.

Yet if our need for status is a fixed thing, we nevertheless retain all say over where we will fulfil that need. We are at liberty to ensure that our worries about being disgraced will arise principally in relation to an audience whose methods of judgement we both understand and respect. Status anxiety may be defined as problematic only insofar as it is inspired by values that we uphold because we are terrified and preternaturally obedient; because we have been anaesthetised into believing that they are natural, perhaps even God-given; because those around us are in thrall to them; or because we have grown too imaginatively timid to conceive of alternatives.

Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia… … have helped to lend legitimacy to those who, in every generation, may be unable or unwilling to comply dutifully with the dominant notions of high status, but who may yet deserve to be categorised under something other than the brutal epithet of ‘loser’ or ‘nobody’. They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way… of succeeding at life.