Status Anxiety and how to avoid it.

"What do you get out of it?". I suppose we've all been asked that question by people who cannot understand the appeal of nights alone in the hills, and whatever answer you might give, the chances are that they will remain unenlightened. For some of us it's to find that small part of ourselves that is easily smothered in the hurly burly of what passes for life. Call it what you will - soul if you must - but without it we are surely diminished.

I guess it must have been ten or twelve years ago, when things were really on the up and up and buying a new car or whatever was a matter of writing a cheque, that I realised that life had somehow become pretty miserable. I was putting in overlong hours and dealing with difficult people for much of the time. Still I carried on. Money and ambition are curious things and cause us to behave in curious ways – good and bad. Yes, they can drive us on to achieve great things and improve our lives. But the compulsion to succeed can also drive us slightly mad.

I went slightly mad.

The only periods of sanity were when I went up to Scotland on the sleeper to go backpacking for a few glorious, liberating days. Taking part in the TGO Challenge was just fantastic – two weeks of freedom from the fax, email and phone (I told the office that none of these worked in the Highlands. I didn’t tell them that they didn’t work because all the devices were switched off and in a drawer at home).

I loved backpacking, especially the enforced egalitarianism of having nothing but what you can carry. No matter how much money you might have, you can only carry so much stuff. In fact, carrying too much is likely to provoke ridicule – quite the reverse of ‘normal life’ where the main point of toil, beyond survival, is the accumulation and display of as much stuff as possible.

Gradually, gradually, walking changed my life. Five years ago I disposed of my company and you could say I retired. The truth is that I just stepped off the treadmill for a while and (so far) have never felt the urge to get on it again, although I do the odd job to keep ticking along.  I soon discovered that living simply isn’t terribly expensive and is vastly more pleasurable.

Now, at this point it might appear that I’m about to say that I’ve become a monk, wear a hair shirt and eat berries and roots gathered from the woods. Not so. In my work I still like to excel, and, as anyone who knows me is well aware, I love my luxuries and take great pleasure from them. The difference lies in being able to distinguish between personal luxuries and status symbols.

The breakthrough for me was the realisation that the pleasure gained from acquiring some expensive gewgaw tended not to add greatly to my stock of satisfaction and happiness – at least not after the first rush of delight. So I just stopped pursuing them. Miss W is of a similar mind. In fact she got there before me. And many people that I meet when I amble across Scotland on the TGOC are seemingly made this way.

Comfortable in their own skin.

Beyond the basics (food, shelter, security, sex) many people are driven not by personal goals but by the craving for high social status, whether merited or not. If one can’t acquire genuine status and respect, then the next best thing is to acquire the badges of status. This, no doubt, is why so many run up huge debts just to parade around in designer labels, drive expensive cars and mortgage their grannies to buy unaffordable houses filled with plasma televisions and the like. Lives dominated by the fleeting triumph of having the latest must have, and the misery of envy as a friend or colleague trumps them.

“It may be tempting to laugh at those afflicted by urgent cravings for the symbols of status: the name droppers, the gold tap owners. … Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury could be more accurately read as a record of emotional trauma. It is the legacy of those who have felt pressured by the disdain of others to add an extraordinary amount to their bare selves in order to signal that they too may lay a claim to love”

Alain de Botton.

That's Status Anxiety. We've all suffered from it from time to time and Alain de Botton analyses the angst that this condition provokes. I read his book shortly after my own period of readjustment and thoroughly enjoyed it. For a book by a philosopher it is remarkably readable, and neatly points up the diminishing returns of increasing wealth. It won’t change your life, but it may make you think about it ...

... and maybe understand why the people you see inside the most expensive cars always seem to look so damn miserable!