Self Help

Social status is alluring. Throughout history, people have believed that they could fight their fear of not being enough by rising in the social hierarchy. But status is a slippery slope. No matter how high you climb, there are countless people still above you. And there’s always a long way to fall if your fortunes should fail. If you compare yourself to the people above you in the pecking order, you’ll sabotage your self-esteem. If you allow yourself to feel superior to the people below you, you’ll live in fear of dropping to their level.

Feeling superior to others is always tempting, but it’s a terribly weak tool for achieving happiness. It may pamper your vanity but it will never bring you peace of mind. If status really made people happy, white-collar workers would be markedly happier than blue-collar workers, since they enjoy more status. However, according to all sorts of studies, they’re not.

One interesting study showed that teenagers - who tend to be even more insecure and status-conscious than adults - are not happier when they’re reared in high-status families. In this study of 1,000 teenagers, those in the lower social classes reported the most happiness, and those in the highest social classes reported the least happiness. Rich kids usually have so much of everything that it’s worth nothing.

One of the worst instigators of status seeking in our current culture is television, because of all its ads, and because so many people on TV are rich and beautiful. Among the most chilling studies on the effects of TV was one done shortly after it was introduced, in the 1950s. Because of government regulations, TV stations were first allowed to broadcast in just 34 cities in 1951, and then in 34 more cities in 1955. In 1951, in the first 34 cities in which TV was allowed, the rate of petty theft and larceny increased dramatically. Then, in 1955, the same increase in property crime was experienced in the next 34 cities. Researchers concluded that TV hyped material status so flagrantly that people became willing to steal to achieve it.

Furthermore, researchers noted that TV increased not only the desire for material status, but also the expectation of it. People felt they deserved status symbols after seeing people on TV with them. This expectation of status pointed out an important general principle in the science of happiness: Happiness depends to a significant degree upon expectations. If you inflate your expectations, you’re begging to be unhappy. That’s one of the worst problems with wealth - it always bloats expectation. Rich people whine about things that would delight most people. Happy people keep their expectations under constraint, no matter how much money they have.