Status Anxiety

Please note that I am using the word "you" loosely in the post below.

• Your 20-year class reunion is a week away and you are on the phone with the rental company trying to get a Mercedes-Benz for the event.
  
• You borrow a pair of your best friend's $500 Manolo Blahniks, which are two sizes too small, and proceed to limp the night away at your husband's holiday party.
  
• You stand at your kitchen window with frown lines engraving ravines in your forehead and watch as your neighbor installs a gilded water fountain on their front lawn.
  
• When introduced to a man half your age who has twice as much hair and is wearing a watch 20 times more expensive than yours, you embellish your job title elevating yourself to VP of Marketing and suddenly run out of business cards.

You, unfortunately, have status anxiety.

Last week I was online looking for my next tasty read. I wanted something deep and satisfying that left my conscious feeling full--something that would help me figure mankind out. So I turned to one of my favorite authors, the modern day philosopher Alain de Botton and selected one of his latest books, "Status Anxiety." I was up until 3 a.m. that same morning reading it. On my way home from downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday afternoon, I pulled out of rush hour traffic, parked on a side street and got in a couple of chapters before continuing home.

People are entirely too interesting. (But then again, almost anything could lure me out of LA traffic.) We take something as pure as the need for love and acceptance and mangle it until it turns into a misdirected, ravenous desire for a $5,000 designer handbag that resembles a feed sack. Like all good psychosocial mysteries, our desire for pretty things, lofty titles, and public adoration is complicated. (How boring we'd be if it wasn't!)

Here's one super simple rational for why we (hopefully not you and me) do this:

SAS (Status Anxiety Sufferer): "My aim in life is to be loved like my mother loved me when I was a baby. But now, I'm not nearly as cute and easy to love so I have to find ways to make people love me. If people pay attention to me and see that I am worthy of notice, they will give me the love that I desperately need. So I will do and buy things that will demand attention. The more money and titles I accrue, the better. The more glitter and gold I consume the more glorious that love will be."

De Botton, a writer who pulls from many of life's disciplines when trying to figure people out, explains this phenomenon in his more erudite prose:

"The predominant impulse behind our desire to rise in the social hierarchy may be rooted not so much in the material goods we can accrue or the power we can wield as in the amount of love we stand to receive as a consequence of high status. Money, fame and influence may be valued more as tokens of--and means to--love rather than ends in themselves." ~ Alain de Botton

Power. Money. Fame...all a stairway to love? Kind of rings true to me. Sounds just like what a human would do: start out with the purest of needs and desires and then slowly, as we gain increasing consciousness transform them into a motly collection of perverse behaviors that drive us to the psychiatrist's couch, Neiman Marcus or Dairy Queen. Some of us go to all three. And I bet it feels natural. That is what makes me feel anxious.