Therapy for Holiday Status Anxiety
We had a lovely holiday. Family mass on Christmas Eve (I sing in a church choir and love the season’s traditional songs). This was followed by a traditional family dinner at a favorite Italian restaurant, and a morning of gift-opening where everyone seemed to have gotten what they want. We spent the afternoon and evening at my sister-in-law’s. She and her husband are incredibly gracious hosts, and served a gourmet feast for 30 people.
Like us, they got a Nintendo Wii for their kids. The big difference is their kids play on what must have been a 42-inch high-def screen in their gorgeous new family room expansion, while mine play on a 20-inch, 12-year-old screen at home in our unfinished basement. Such comparisons are difficult to resist, and inevitably inspire some envy.
Another example: Last week a friend told me about asking her (very wealthy) sister-in-law what her nieces and nephews would like for Christmas, only to be told (in an apparently snobby manner) that “they really have everything they need.” The implication was my friend couldn’t possibly come up with anything these well-to-do children didn’t already have in their toy box or closet.
For anyone with similar experiences around the holidays, I recommend the book “Status Anxiety” by Alain de Botton. It combines history, philosophy and psychology with sly and hilarious commentary, explaining why we engage in materialism and indulge in destructive comparisons (we’re not really seeking bling, but love).
Plato, David Hume, St. Augustine, Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville are just a few of the figures who appear in Botton’s tome, which looks at art, politics and religion, among other issues. He examines medieval times, when status anxiety was prevented by widespread religious belief, which “reinforced the concept that every member of society had been assigned an unalterable role, a scheme that made it no less ludicrous for a peasant to wish to take up residence in a manor house and have a say in his own governance than for a toe to aspire to be an eye.”
Botton amusingly contrasts this with the more egalitarian thinking that followed and gave rise to the self-improvement movement – from Benjamin Franklin (“there are no gains without pains”) to Anthony Robbins (“we all have the capability to carry out our dreams”) — concluding that “the price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.”
An entertaining journey through the history of envy, it’s a fine distraction from the envy that can dampen your high holiday spirits.
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January 1st, 2008 at 7:58 pm
I am a single mom and both of my kids are born in December. We are a middle class family, but whenever anyone asks what my kids need I say the same thing your friend’s wealthy SIL said. In fact, when I took the kids to see Santa, they couldn’t come up with anything to write on their list for Santa. I have emphasized that we have everything that we need and that “stuff” doesn’t make you happy, people do.
Hi Indio: Good point — thanks for the post.