There is nowhere where I’ve witnessed (and felt) more status anxiety than in Lesswrong
If that were true, one of the first replies would have been a status-lowering response of the form “you can’t be going out much”.
You may be confusing status anxiety and awareness of the peculiarly confusing nature of status, which can be a source of anxiety, but is (I suspect) different from what de Botton calls status anxiety.
As for “status addiction”, that strikes me as a phrase of the same type as “water addiction”—denotationally correct, in the sense that no one seems able to give it up for any length of time, but connotationally objectionable, as it implies that we should be able to give it up, when it’s not clear that anyone could.
Maybe a more generous comparison would be “money addiction”. Status, I have argued, is a type of currency—something you regularly acquire and spend. If you’re canny enough, you can come out of these transactions with a “profit”, more than you started from. Everybody in modern western societies desires money, because it’s needed to do practically anything. Status works more or less the same way, and is in fact somewhat tradable with money.
That is a brilliant response to the little I wrote. Thanks!
You’ve deconstructed my original question, while creating a few new related ones that may turn out more interesting when the day ends.
If that were true, one of the first replies would have been a status-lowering response of the form “you can’t be going out much”.
You may be confusing status anxiety and awareness of the peculiarly confusing nature of status, which can be a source of anxiety, but is (I suspect) different from what de Botton calls status anxiety.
As for “status addiction”, that strikes me as a phrase of the same type as “water addiction”—denotationally correct, in the sense that no one seems able to give it up for any length of time, but connotationally objectionable, as it implies that we should be able to give it up, when it’s not clear that anyone could.
Maybe a more generous comparison would be “money addiction”. Status, I have argued, is a type of currency—something you regularly acquire and spend. If you’re canny enough, you can come out of these transactions with a “profit”, more than you started from. Everybody in modern western societies desires money, because it’s needed to do practically anything. Status works more or less the same way, and is in fact somewhat tradable with money.
That is a brilliant response to the little I wrote. Thanks! You’ve deconstructed my original question, while creating a few new related ones that may turn out more interesting when the day ends.