Status Anxiety - Book Summary, Notes & Highlights
- Jacelyn Chu
- Feb 9, 2022
- 8 min read
Status anxiety is the pernicious worry about the danger of failing to conform to ideals of success laid down by society. We’re anxious because our self-concept is dependent on what others make of us.
Table of contents
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
There is an almost universal anxiety that rarely gets mentioned directly: an anxiety about what others think of us; about whether we’re judged a success or a failure, a winner or a loser.
We care about our status for a simple reason: because most people tend to be nice to us according to the amount of status we have.
The context and the people around us have a massive impact on our behaviour.
🎨 Impressions
What an eye-opening book! Status Anxiety brings up a lot of issues that were on the back of my mind but that I really need to come to terms with. I’ve always tried to challenge the parts of the status quo that are a waste of time and energy, and this book just gave me more motivation to keep this habit.
🔍 How I Discovered It
👤 Who Should Read It?
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? This is for those who are grappling with societal pressures to perform and are interested in identifying the ways that your desire to be seen as someone successful makes you mentally unhealthy and also shows ways that you can combat the disease of trying to climb the never-ending social ladder.
☘️ How the Book Changed Me
I learnt that...
status anxiety is more pernicious and destructive than most of us can imagine. It convinces vulnerable people (without fascinating job titles) that their best personal qualities are worthless. It causes people to strive and struggle to meet goals that do little to further their inner well-being, on the (often unconscious) assumption that if their status improves, their worries will vanish.
once you’ve recognized the symptoms of status anxiety and snobbery in yourself, the remedy is to get out of the status game altogether, surrounding yourself with friends who are willing to take the time to get to know a person, regardless of the first impression.
it’s easier to realize your human potential when you feel free to experiment, to make mistakes, to take your time becoming somebody without feeling like a complete nobody in the meantime.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest for sexual love - is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second - the story of our quest for love from the world - is a more secret and shameful tale. It tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here too.
The dominant kind of snobbery that exists nowadays is job snobbery. You encounter it within minutes at a party, when you get asked that famous iconic question of the early 21st century,"What do you do?"According to how you answer that question, people are either incredibly delighted to see you,or look at their watch and make their excuses.
📒 Summary + Notes
#1: snobbery
The dominant kind of snobbery that exists nowadays is job snobbery. Not necessarily your mother, or indeed mine, but, as it were, the ideal mother, somebody who doesn't care about your achievements. Unfortunately, most people make a strict correlation between how much time and love in general, respect -- they are willing to accord us, that will be strictly defined by our position in the social hierarchy. That's a lot of the reason why we care so much about our careers and indeed start caring so much about material goods.
We're often told that we live in very materialistic times, that we're all greedy people. It's not that we are particularly materialistic. I think we live in a society which has pegged certain emotional rewards to the acquisition of material goods. It's not the material goods we want; it's the rewards we want. The next time you see somebody driving a Ferrari, think, "This is somebody who is incredibly vulnerable and in need of love." Feel sympathy, rather than contempt.
#2: Envy Never before have expectations been so high about what human beings can achieve with their lifespan. We're told that anyone can achieve anything. We've done away with the caste system, we are now in a system where anyone can rise to any position they please. And it's a beautiful idea. Along with that is a kind of spirit of equality; we're all basically equal. There are no strictly defined hierarchies. There is one really big problem with this, and that problem is envy.
And it's linked to the spirit of equality. The closer two people are -- in age, in background, in the process of identification -- the more there's a danger of envy, which is incidentally why we should never go to a school reunion, because there is no stronger reference point than people one was at school with. The problem of modern society is it turns the whole world into a school. Everybody's wearing jeans, everybody's the same. And yet, they're not. So there's a spirit of equality combined with deep inequality, which can make for a very stressful situation.
The consequences of this problem make themselves felt in bookshops. When you go to a large bookshop and look at the self-help sections -- if you analyze self-help books produced in the world today, there are basically two kinds. The first kind tells you, "You can do it! You can make it! Anything's possible!" The other kind tells you how to cope with what we politely call "low self-esteem," or impolitely call, "feeling very bad about yourself." There's a real correlation between a society that tells people that they can do anything, and the existence of low self-esteem. So that's another way in which something quite positive can have a nasty kickback.
#3 meritocracy
A meritocratic society is one in which, if you've got talent and energy and skill, you will get to the top, nothing should hold you back. It's a beautiful idea. The problem is, if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you'll also, by implication, believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there. In other words, your position in life comes to seem not accidental, but merited and deserved. And that makes failure seem much more crushing. In the Middle Ages, in England, when we meet a very poor person, that person would be described as an "unfortunate" -- literally, somebody who had not been blessed by fortune, an unfortunate. Nowadays, particularly in the United States, if you meet someone at the bottom of society, they may unkindly be described as a "loser." There's a real difference between an unfortunate and a loser, and that shows 400 years of evolution in society and our belief in who is responsible for our lives. It's no longer the gods, it's us. We're in the driving seat. That's exhilarating if you're doing well, and very crushing if you're not. It leads, in the worst cases -- in the analysis of a sociologist like Emil Durkheim -- it leads to increased rates of suicide. There are more suicides in developed, individualistic countries than in any other part of the world. And some of the reason for that is that people take what happens to them extremely personally -- they own their success, but they also own their failure.
Actionable steps: overcoming status anxiety
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
In viewing art, we can nurture our capacity for empathy or rebalance our moral perspective through a few ways:
Countering snobbery
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.
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. 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.
Additionally, 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 status?
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.
4. Embrace a bohemian lifestyle
In the Bohemian culture, status is more likely to be earned through creative, intellectual processes 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.
Conclusion
We're particularly drawn to nature. Not for the sake of our health, though it's often presented that way, but because it's an escape from the human anthill. It's an escape from our own competition, and our own dramas. And that's why we enjoy looking at glaciers and oceans, and contemplating the Earth from outside its perimeters, etc. We like to feel in contact with something that is non-human, and that is so deeply important to us.
It is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but we should focus in on our ideas, and make sure that we own them; that we are truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it's bad enough not getting what you want, but it's even worse to have an idea of what it is you want, and find out, at the end of the journey, that it isn't, in fact, what you wanted all along. let's accept the strangeness of some of our ideas. Let's probe away at our notions of success. Let's make sure our ideas of success are truly our own.
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