How To Escape
Book Choice for April 2022: Status Anxiety, A. de Botton, 2004
Good Afternoon.
Yes, it is October. A month which should mean leaves rustling in red-gold breezes, but we seem to have skipped from summer sun directly to chilly November this year, which is a bit sad. There is not too much basking in the Octobery-ness of it all this year, although who knows, that may come back. We are not even half way through yet.
It has been months since I blogged, but I have really wanted to. I am just hopping on today to record my thoughts on certain books that I went out of my way to get my hands on earlier this year. Regarding the first of these, “Status Anxiety”, I do not have too much to say, although it was interesting and well written. Not to toot my own horn however, but the content of this book is, for the most part, things you will pick up over the course of your life. Looking back at the Table of Contents, I can see that the first part (which I had completely forgotten) treats various modern problems: “lovelessness,* expectation, meritocracy, snobbery and dependence.” These must have been interesting enough to read about at the time, but I remember zero of the content. Suffice it to say that these indeed are modern problems, waaaay high up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, to the point where I believe that you can choose to be bothered by these or not (whereas, somethings in life you cannot choose to be bothered by. They are problems, endemic, actual problems with a capital P; these other elite problems are, I suppose, interesting enough to lightly ponder on occasion).
(*lovelessness in de Botton’s work meant more about not being appreciated/rewarded as much as you would like to be, via complements and “respect” at one’s job etc., which can be rather a bottomless pit; not like, chronically never having close relationships or having been loved by parents or friends, which IS, of course, a major human need and a total lack of companionship and care would be a major problem).
In the second half of the book, which I do remember, de Botton offers “solutions”, which are really ways to escape from these problems. These are the things that I mean that you basically “pick up” by having lived in the world for any length of time, ever conversed over wine with guys who read philosophy (less avoidable a scenario than you might think) or by like, reading the culture section of a newspaper ever, or really, not even going that far. He offers truisms along the lines of “people use religion to solve/avoid their problems like fear of death” (which is pretty obvious), but also “now that we (in Western Europe) generally don’t have religion, we are suffering more because we assume everything is within our control, whereas lots of things are not.” Yes. True. Not exactly rewriting history, but this book collects a lot of such truisms, that one has generally had some contact with before, under the headings “philosophy, art, politics, religion, bohemia.”
The most interesting section to me, by far, was the section on “Bohemia.” By this, de Botton means that one can escape the modern problems that make you sad by living an alternate lifestyle. I believe most of his examples consisted of the turn-of-the-century-Paris-garret-artist variety (something that has by now been so mythologized I’m not really sure it ever really happened), and I believe he must have gone on about other artists colonies or basically, other alternative groups. There was nothing shocking here, but I remember being slightly inflamed in my heart after “Oh yes! Bohemia IS the answer!” But not knowing where exactly to run to. I realized almost immediately however, that my own personal Bohemia is Academia. The relentless pursuit of a “calling” (—although you are not supposed to say this any more—there is apparently nothing vocational or spiritual allowed about “the academic track” any more, we have quantitative metrics and paper-rankings now) is my escape mechanism. For me, academia is a spiritual path and a love affair and if I die for it so what, I died for love. It’s a really healthy mindset I promise you.
So anyway, that last section of this work was thought provoking, I realized afresh that I do try and escape the modern world, so thanks for that Alan. It’s a good book for (sort-of) pinning names on vague feelings about life, but I did come away with the feeling that it would have been EXACTLY what I wanted while I was in my last couple years of high school—like, if I could have corralled my attention span then (dubious) I would have really enjoyed it, because all of these currents in the social air would have been new to me and exciting. And I certainly was already looking for a way to escape. I wish I had had it then.
In the end, worth a read because it is nicely written, 3/5.