spectacle anxiety

“Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life—its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness—conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.”
-Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation”

“If our need for status is a fixed thing, we nevertheless retain all say over where we will fulfil that need. We are at liberty to ensure that our worries about being disgraced will arise principally in relation to an audience whose methods of judgement we both understand and respect. Status anxiety may be defined as problematic only insofar as it

“Rousseau’s Discourse goes on to sketch the history of the world not as a story of progress from barbarism to the great workshops and cities of Europe, but as one of regress, from a privileged state in which we humans lived simply but were aware of our own needs to a state in which we are apt to feel envy for ways of life that can claim little conn

Nicolas Chamfort—”Public opinion is the worst of all opinions” … “One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be an idiocy, because it has been able to appeal to a majority” (90).

from Chamfort’s Maxims, 1795

Status Anxiety

Alain de Botton

“We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like—we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our ostensible equals” (30).

Status Anxiety

Alain de Botton

“It is the feeling that we might, under different circumstances, be something other than what we are—a feeling inspired by exposure to the superior achievements of those whom we take to be our equals—that generates anxiety and resentment” (29).

Status Anxiety

Alain de Botton

“Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, “Why the Americans Are Often So Restless in the Midst of their Prosperity” (1835)

“When all prerogatives of birth and fortune have been abolished, when every profession is open to everyone …an ambitious man may think it is easy to launch himself on a great career and feel that he has been called to no co