Status Anxiety summary

When you were a baby, what exactly did you do that inspired everyone around to ooh, and ahh, and fawn over you? It probably wasn’t your crying, screaming, and burping – it was just the fact that you were alive, not to mention small and cute.

Sadly, as we get older, our social circle expands to start including people who don’t respect and love us unconditionally. Instead, we need to earn their approval and admiration. And often, those we’re trying to impress are self-important snobs.

If you tried to list all the advantages we in modern society have when compared to, say, medieval Europeans, you might need a couple of hours. Not only were everyday conveniences rare for the peasantry, but they also had to cope with famine and disease while the rich kept a safe distance. Most people’s status anxiety must have been through the roof, right?

Actually, while our material comforts have increased exponentially in the last two thousand years, so have our levels of status anxiety. Why haven’t we managed to achieve mental stability alongside physical comfort?

Picture a scene from medieval Europe: a lord and lady decked out in their richest garb, sipping wine and strolling through well-manicured gardens. Peasants labor in the fields and in their tiny huts not too far away. Now ask yourself – did the lord and lady ever fear being struck by misfortune and becoming peasants, and did the peasant seriously aspire to one day become a lord?

In the past, status was pretty much immutable. In fact, it was extraordinarily difficult to stop being a lord if you wanted to, even as it was basically impossible to stop being a laborer. But despite the lack of social mobility, the working classes of medieval and pre-modern Europe had one significant source of comfort – Christianity. To them, rich and poor people existed not because some had worked harder to achieve their status than others, but simply because God had willed it. Both groups had a recognized place in society, and even if the rich looked condescendingly upon the poor, each recognized the other’s role.

Most of us grow up assuming that, one day, we’ll need to find a job and be employed by someone else. But just 200 years ago, in 1800, only 20 percent of the American workforce was employed by another person. By 1900, that figure rose to 50 percent, and by 2000, 90 percent. 

In today’s work environment, much of our own success is tied to our employer’s. But unfortunately, the conditions of labor don’t tend to be weighted in the employees’ favor.

A story goes that when Alexander the Great visited Corinth in the early fifth century BC, he found the philosopher Diogenes dressed in rags and sitting underneath a tree. When Alexander asked him if he could do anything to help, Diogenes simply responded, “Yes, if you could step out of the way. You are blocking the sun” – with no heed for the fact that Alexander was the most powerful person in the world at the time.

Diogenes, of course, understood the difference between kindness and ridicule – what he had decided to ignore was the rule set provided by the traditional honor code. From its origins right up to the present day, philosophers have questioned the status quo, forcing us to ask ourselves why we value what we do. Instead of blindly accepting others’ perceptions of them as reality, philosophers used reason to assess other people's judgments.

In Industrial Revolution-era England, art and practicality were butting heads. Those in favor of practicality argued that art can’t build factories, lay railways, or plan new cities. Art-supporters, on the other hand, claimed that art could offer solutions to some of life’s most deep-set anxieties.

“Art is the criticism of life,” wrote Matthew Arnold, a poetry professor at Oxford, and one of art’s biggest defenders at the time. What did he mean by that statement? Perhaps just that there are things about life worth criticizing – including our approach to status.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that our modern society’s definition of success is natural or universal. But, societies throughout history have had wildly different ideas about who deserves status and who doesn’t. 

Take the ancient Spartans. An ideal Spartan was an aggressive man with bulging muscles and a disinterest in family life. He didn’t know how to count, because doing so would indicate a commercial spirit, and he lived and breathed battle – so much that he was only allowed one night per month with his wife. If his children were born “weak,” they would be taken into the mountains and left to die. 

According to the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, the ancient Egyptians had a custom of bringing out stretchers carrying skeletons and passing them between the tables at the end of great feasts. Was this to make partygoers even more keen to drink and dance, or to send them back home on a serious note?

Unfortunately, Herodotus doesn’t give us an answer. In either case, though, the thought of death brings people closer to whatever they value in life, whether it’s partying by the banks of the Nile or choosing to stop partying and do something else. Though it might seem morbid at first, the reminder of death, or memento mori, helps us cast off other people’s opinions and reassess what is truly important to us.

When you hear the word “bohemian,” you might picture a young, hippie-ish man or woman with messy hair, baggy clothing, and the job title of poet or artist. While bohemian fashion is now a modern fad, bohemia itself actually began in the early nineteenth century. The term defined a loose group of people who dressed simply, lived in cheap areas, valued art over business, and sometimes had nontraditional sex lives.

The bourgeoisie first came into prominence around Napoleon’s fall in 1815. Shortly after, the bohemians rose up to oppose almost everything they stood for – primarily materialism and triviality. Most importantly, bohemians challenged traditional ideas of who deserved status and for what reason.