SOLICITED ADVICE #8: Overcoming status anxiety?
Values vs. vibes, creating vs. consuming, overcoming envy and comparison. Send your questions to askingsherry@gmail.com and I might answer yours here:
Hey Sherry! I’ve been reading you for a while now and I love your point of view on things. Here’s a question I think you could have a nice perspective on.
In the age of social media and constant exposure to curated lifestyles, it’s easy to fall into a spiral of comparison and “status anxiety”. We're bombarded with so much information about what it means to be cool, smart, wealthy, or cultured, that it can start to make you question things you once believed about yourself.
Status has become hyper-visible and commodified, and reduced to “starter packs” or things you can buy, places you can be seen, and circles you can belong to. And when you don’t see yourself reflected in those "menus" it kind of gets to you and you ask yourself if maybe you're not who you thought you were.
How to deal with the status anxiety that comes from this comparison, and resist the urge to reduce ourselves to a “starter pack” or checklist version of status or identity?
With love,
M.
[back at you! 💗]
Related: “Overcoming FOMO”, “On Not Having Enough Money”, and “Envy”.
The (trite) question, “Does money buy happiness?” is really asking “Can earthly possessions create the harmony that my soul is looking for?”
Why do we buy anything? Because desire. Why do we desire? Because we want to satiate an appetite; we feel like we have a lack of something—an emptiness to fill. For example, we may feel like we want the same jacket as our neighbor because they look amazing in it, and we would like to look just as hot (i.e., I desire to be attractive, I want the thing that makes one look attractive).
We feel a misbalance when someone is better off than we are. What shopping really exploits is the feeling of “they have it, so I must have it too.” As Charlie Munger puts it, It’s not greed that drives the world but envy.
Here are five practical ways to overcome status anxiety: