Status Anxiety

I finished produly entered the double digits last week by finishing book #10 (whoop! whoop!): Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety. The book is rather concisely described in the second paragraph on de Botton's website:

This is a book about an almost universal anxiety that rarely gets mentioned directly: an anxiety about what others think of us; about whether we're judged a success or a failure, a winner or a loser. This is a book about status anxiety.

The first part of the book is all a recap on how we got to where we are today - status obsessed and status insecure. de Botton spends some time detailing how, as a culture, we weren't always so status obsessed, and, in fact, in some circles (religious among them) it was thought a blessing to not be status obsessed, but rather to be focused on higher, mightier, and more moral things.

Along comes Horatio Alger, self-sufficiency, and that whole movement of picking yourself up by your bootstraps and being a self-made man; making status the pre-eminent way to judge and be judged.

The second half of the book is all about "solutions" to this status obsessions (part 2 is appropriately named, "Solutions"). This details, in great depth, how subversives in movements such as religion, politics, art, and Bohemia have all fought the good fight against our obsession over status and "won."

Overall, the book itself is kinda strange. The writing is really good - punchy, quick, and articulate. A very enjoyable read, from the pure "language" perspective. And the topics, while all over the map and not necessarily "on thesis," are all interesting to read about and to think about at a high level.

But the proportions of the book are really wacky - the description of the status anxiety problem is both a little light on real research and is only 100 of the 300 pages. The second half of the book (solutions) is the remaining 200 pages. To call it "wandering" is a polite way to describe the rather purposeless rants and side tracking that de Botton does in the second half. "Art" as a solution section alone is 50 pages of rather high-level art historical overview of a smattering of paintings that seems not only grossly under-researched, but less than germane to the topic.

I can't say I didn't enjoy it - the book reads well and has a very nice pace. But I also can't say I walked away with a nice piece of learning or in-depth thinking on the status anxiety problem. Having said that, it's nice to finally read a book with pictures in the book and a cool cover, so I'm not complaining...