Status Anxiety

Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety . New York: Pantheon, 2004. 306pp.

“Every adult life,” Alain de Botton argues, “could be said to be defined by two great love stories.” The first is the romantic quest for sexual love and companionship, and it is the subject of innumerable poems, stories, and paintings. The other story is “more secret and shameful,” the story of our “quest for love from the world.” “Status anxiety” refers to our gnawing fear of failure in this second pursuit, and the book explores how the gap between ambition and achievement can undermine self-confidence but also how our hunger to be loved in the world can spur us to competitive achievement. Status Anxiety is wide-ranging and thoughtful. De Botton explains how modern societies nurture status anxiety by dissolving traditional, fixed notions of status and by raising expectations for success, and he suggests that philosophy, art, religion, and bohemian counter-cultures provide resources for resistance to the dominant notions of status. De Botton is a bit of a Bobo himself, reaping in the status rewards of well-reviewed books, television productions, and a flashy website while celebrating the virtues of bohemia. And his treatment of Christianity is disappointing; in one chapter, he reduces the religion of resurrection to an elaborate memento mori. But his book is an erudite reminder that the honor-shame dynamics of traditional societies are not so foreign to advanced capitalist civilization as we like to think.