Status Anxiety
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Status Anxiety (ISBN 0-375-42083-5) is a nonfiction book by Alain de Botton. It was first published in 2004 by Hamish Hamilton; subsequent publications have been by Penguin Books. Status Anxiety discusses the desire of people in many modern societies to "climb the social ladder", and the anxieties that result from a focus on how one is perceived by others. De Botton claims that chronic anxiety about status is an inevitable side effect of any democratic, ostensibly egalitarian society.
A two-hour documentary film featuring de Botton's investigation of this thesis was released in 2004.
