Status Anxiety (NON-FICTION)

by Alain de Botton

however independent-minded we might judge ourselves to be, we are dangerously poor at understanding our own needs. Our souls rarely articulate what they must have in order to be satisfied, or, when they do mumble something, their commands are likely to be misfounded or contradictory. Rather than comparing the mind with a body correct in its sense of what it should consume in order to be healthy, Rousseau invited us to think of it as being more like a body that cries out for wine when it needs water and insists it should be dancing when it should in truth be flat on a bed. Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and can distract us from the careful, arduous task of correctly tracing our priorities. Rousseau went 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 away from a privileged state in which we lived simply but had the chance to sound out our needs, towards one where we were apt to feel envy for ways of life with few connections to our own characters. In technologically backward pre-history, in Rousseau’s state of nature, when men and women lived in forests and had never entered a shop or read a newspaper, the philosopher pictured people more easily understanding themselves, and so being drawn towards essential features of a satisfied life: a l...