Jargogled Impressions.

Anxiety results when reality does not live up to our expectations. Our expectations are often predicated around what we see around us and what we see people that we relate to doing or achieving around us. These expectations are often a mirage of what we believe to be our own expectations as we constantly attempt to please the people around us as opposed to pleasing ourselves and our own motivations.

But what we are chasing after is a set of virtues or ways of being that is different from what the society is telling us to do in terms of our relentless pursuit of money, prestige, and recognition.

I read this somewhere – “we have no obligation to be useful to the society we live in”. And that translates to no obligation or duty to strive for making an impact in the world around us through business, or social service, or art, or anything for that matter. The obligations we believe we have, are driven by our interactions with the outside world, and our limited ability to sink deeper into the abyss of our own minds to surface our authentic desires and things that give us happiness and pleasure.

“Work is fun” is a concept I have read about often and most of the convocation speeches profess of chasing the idea of either choosing a sort of work that seems like a play to you, or on the flip side, making the work that you do a sort of playing field with which you can constantly have fun around. But too often, in the hedonic treadmill we are part of, we let the external, shiny surfaces dissuade us from the core idea of living each moment of our life as a play. To me at least, the strategy of approaching everything I do as a play, and consequently fun, isn’t all that unreal. True, as part of my profession or any profession for that matter, I’d need to do a lot of things that won’t seem like play to me. Several tasks or activities that I abhor doing will seem like forced upon me and in that sense a “work” that I need to do in order to earn the currency of the society.

We constantly assess and evaluate “our place in the world” which is effectively how the society and the people around us weigh our presence, our experiences, our thoughts, and our opinions. Living as we do, in the middle of society with friends and acquaintances and office colleagues, it’s only but natural that we start defining our existence relative to how the society perceives it.

Alain De Botton is a popular philosopher whose ideas and articulations I have come to love and identify with. His gentle and often topical thoughts on everyday philosophy in our lives is concise and speaks volumes about how our society has evolved over the years to its current state today when chasing happiness is often correlated with chasing money, fame, popularity.

In his book – Status Anxiety, he outlines several factors that drive what he calls “status anxiety”, or the constant fear of being perceived as “unsuccessful” by the society in materialistic terms. He drives across various causes that drive anxiety:

Love lessness: people who are unable to find love in their lives often view others as having them and view their relative positioning in society as being lesser than those who were fortunate enough to find them

Expectation: our expectations, as I highlighted earlier, drive a lot of discord between who we are and what we expected to be and this chasm that opens between the two is often a source of anxiety. This happens even when our expectations are more externally driven versus something that we can call our own; the flip side to this is that it’s also often believed that we are lowering our expectations because we are just not capable enough and that any excuses we give to not coming true to our expectations is actually our failure to try harder and be more active and be more intelligent about where we want to be. And that brings to the next cause – meritocracy

Meritocracy: we  have been taught to inherently believe in the idea of meritocracy which says that you can rise and climb the social ladders of success through merits alone; and unfortunately, what goes hand in hand with this is, that if you are not successful in your life, the way society defines success, you do not have the merit – again, it becomes a source of anxiety then we start perceiving ourselves as being “just not good enough”

Snobbery: as inequality has risen in the world around us, it has become easier for us to interact with people with vastly different backgrounds and context than ever before and that surfaces the inequality in opportunities, in fortune, in money, in fame, and in success all the more to the forefront; with the internet, it has become all the more easier to click through what people are doing around us and how they are leading lives – some with deliberate intentions to highlight their snobbish attitude online than others; this results in an anxiety about our place in the society versus others with more fortune; snobbery is a term used to describe people who believe there is a correlation between social status and human worth. Social status, as the name suggests, is driven by societal measures or success and status versus human worth is inherently more internal and inward looking; forming a correlation between the two and looking down upon people who may not have the social status as the world demands it is what snobs do; and the social status is a mix of different factors like wealth, caste, education, etc.

Dependence: dependence on someone other than yourself for your livelihood or other matters makes for anxiety around our ability to lead our life independently.

There are several solutions that the book also reportedly offers in dealing with the anxiety around status that people commonly experience.

1. Philosophy: there’s consolations that philosophy can provide on different anxieties that we typically suffer from across a) unpopularity, b) not having enough money, c) frustration, d) inadequacy, e) broken heart, f) difficulties; through sharing ideas from diverse philosophers like Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, De Botton tries to uncover ideas that we can borrow from philosophy to make some sense of the world we live in and deal with the anxieties that form part of our social life
2. Art: art as therapy is something I do align with; there have been a number of novels I have read that has revolved around a piece of art (usually painting) that provides a sense of deeper meaning and attachment to people who are suffering from the challenges of a mortal life and relying on the deeper meaning and interpretation behind the paintings to derive meaning
3. Politics: not sure I understand this but politics and involving ourselves with certain political affiliations lets us define our identity around a unit or a social group that lets us deal with the status anxiety by finding a group of people we identify with and find things in common with;
4. Religion: people try to deal with their anxieties by using religion and its concepts of spiritualism and belief in a power far greater than yourself; the whole idea of religion, in that sense, is 180 degrees to the idea of meritocracy in that the idea of higher power translates to fortune, fate, intelligent design that drives how we do in the world; also, the idea of karma and of continuous cycle of life tries to shift some blame to the deeds of our previous lives – something that we cannot change but can reverse by focusing more on inner spiritualism, enlightenment, good work, etc.
5. Bohemianism: bohemianism is a curious and unconventional decision that people take on leading a life antithetical to societal mores by deliberately adopting a lifestyle that runs counter to the hedonic treadmill like life that normal people do; often it involves pursuits across musical, artistic, literary, or spiritual areas; wanderers, adventurers, vagabonds, etc.