Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

On Tuesday, our post, which centered on Status Anxiety, the latest work by Alain de Botton, provoked faithful Rainy Day visitor Angie Schultz to write "...if I were the woman on De Botton's cover, I'd be worried about my status seeing as a) my skirt is slit high up the back and b) my tiny heels are going to cause me to sink into the wet earth and become stuck, thereby exposing me to status-sucking ridicule when I try to extricate myself, fall face down in the mud, and expose my hinder to the multitudes."

Angie will be pleased to learn that the American version of the book comes with a cover that will not threaten her or us with exposure. The book is featured in Atlantic Unbound, in a piece called "The Status-tician", in which Adam Baer conducts a stimulating Q&A with the author. "Why do the successes of our peers drive us crazy?" is what Baer wishes to know. A sample:

Why have modern populations proved to be so incapable of feeling content with what they have and how they're viewed by so-called "reference groups," the communities that they feel close to?

I think a lot of it has to do with the idea of what's normal-of what is an acceptable standard of everyday living. And of course the bar keeps being raised ever higher in modern society. Look at advertising: its sole function is to make us feel that certain things are missing from our lives. So today it's possible for someone to feel poor if they don't have air-conditioning or a flat-screen TV in a way that they wouldn't have fifty or even ten years ago. Our sense of what it is to be reasonably well-off keeps changing, keeps rising-even though all of us are much better off than people were hundreds of years ago. But no one compares themselves to someone who lived three-hundred years ago or to someone in sub-Saharan Africa. We take our points of reference from those around us: our friends, our family. These are the people who determine our feelings of success. Which is why Rousseau wrote that the best way to become rich is not by trying to make more money, but by separating yourself from anyone around you who has had the bad taste to become more successful than you. It's a facetious point, but it's also a serious one. Feelings of wealth are relative.

Why does the obsession with our place in society make us so unhappy? According to de Botton, it's bound up with our fear of lovelessness, unrealistic expectations about life, snobbery, the notion that academic achievement will be rewarded and the fact that we are at the mercy of talent, luck, our employers and the global economy. The good news, says the status-tician, is that status anxiety can be can be cured if we devote more time to philosophy, art, politics, religion and going to the pub. By thinking more and striving less, we can learn to appreciate our ordinary lives. By contemplating the beauty of the ordinary, we can rid ourselves of the destructive desire for more. I'll drink to that.