Currently I have been flipping through pages of magazines, gazing and admiring fashion editorials, exploring fascinating design books, and of course reading philosophical books that has kept me highly entertained, provoked thoughts, and is genuinely helping myself live through our society. The book is called Status Anxiety by an English author Alain de Botton. He is one of my favorite authors in this modern century, besides Emerson, Morse, and Hunt, his style of reasoning and description has taken such a deep grasp in my mind and heart, this book has significantly taught me many attributes of self and others. Basically Botton had sectioned this book into different segments of categories. The first part are causes-love, expectation, meritocracy, snobbery, and dependence. Then the second part are solutions-philosophy, art, politics, religion, and bohemia. All these elements reveal the views of the universal anxiety that rarely gets mentioned directly, and basically an anxiety about what others think of us. It's so important to realize that us beings are created in a natural way to feel and think of how were viewed, what actions we take and recognize. Whether we're judged a success or failure, a winner or a loser, our life is revolved around the center of status anxiety. Botton examines origins of status anxiety- where our worries come from and what? evolution has effected our overall thoughts and feelings. We learn from philosophers, artists, bohemians, and nonetheless ourselves. If I had to reference a book that will help get a better understanding of where status anxiety comes from, this book ingeniously breaks down the barriers of how we can surmount the anxiety in our lives.
Here is one of my favorite paragraphs from the first chapter of Causes-I.Lovelessness:
5.
"The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a cogenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgemnts of those we live among...In an ideal world, we would be more impermeable. We would be unshaken whether we were ignored or noticed, admired or ridiculed. If we had carried a fair assessment of our strengths and decided upon our value, another's suggestion that we were inconsequential would not wound us. We would know our worth. Instead we each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities...Our "ego" or self-conception could be pictured as a leaking balloon, forever requiring the helium of external love to remain inflated, and ever vulnerable to the smallest pinpricks of neglect. There is something at once sobering and absurd in the extent to which we are lifted by the attentions of others and sunk by their disregard."
