Status Anxiety

Status Anxiety identifies 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.

It’s obvious that the rich try to get richer just because they’re greedy, right? But it makes no sense that someone would keep trying to build wealth even after they’ve acquired an amount they could never reasonably spend.

If materialism really was people’s only reason for wanting more money, sooner or later they’d run out of stuff to purchase and they’d stop. But that doesn’t happen, which means something else is going on.

To understand this, we need to look at how it feels to be in positions of high and low statuses. Even just the terminology we use, referring to people low on the totem pole as “nobodies” is degrading. We all want to be “somebody” instead, so we seek status so others don’t ignore us.

Another way of looking at it is that we all want to feel like people respect and love us. We want to matter to at least someone in the world.

The problem with status-seeking is it completely overlooks our own self-worth. If we don’t know our own value, it’s only natural that we’ll base our identity on what others think of us. This is part of why seeking prominence stresses us out so much.

Instead of basing your self-worth on whether or not you’re a “somebody,” try looking inward. What do you like about yourself? What do your loved ones like about you?

Let’s step back into medieval Europe for a moment. We could talk for hours about how much better we have it today. Disease and famine ravaged the poor class while the rich stayed isolated. Certainly people in these times had more status anxiety than we do now, right? Unfortunately not. With a rise in common material luxuries came an increase in a desire to maintain social heirarchies. Shouldn’t we have beaten this unfortunate consequence by now though? Before the American revolution, people didn’t value equality. Once the US became a country, however, humanity also saw an increase in the desire for economic achievements. The former hereditary class system was over. Once people saw their lives could improve, they sought to do so as much as possible. But that came with a constant restlessness for more. Once affluence became attainable and even the expectation, people struggled when they didn’t have it. This got worse when they saw their neighbors having things they didn’t have. This causes angst because we don’t decide whether we have enough until we see how much others have. In other words,…