Dear: Twelve
It’s a new week, we meet again, Xiaoqi is here again.
What is the book I want to talk to you about this week? "Identity Anxiety " by Alain de Botton. When I read this book, I was completely attracted by the title. After all, in a materialistic society, how many young people are free from anxiety?
Especially after Beidiao, friends around me either have to join a major Internet company or have a home and career. I often feel like I am a drifter, and I don’t know when I will stop drifting.
Simply follow Alain de Botton and dig deeper into anxiety, and you may be able to find some ways to alleviate it.
Alain de Botton elaborated on the causes of anxiety from five aspects:
- Desire for identity
"Being noticed by others, being cared for by others, receiving sympathy, praise and support from others, this is the value we want to get from all actions."
- snobbery
If the pain suffered by a person with a low status is manifested as poverty on the material level, then being ignored and looked down upon by others is the pain suffered by these people who lack important identity markers on the spiritual level. "
" Snobs only care about the reputation and achievements of others. Once the reputation and achievements of people he is familiar with change, these snobs are likely to take notice and rearrange their so-called closest friends, thereby performing a tragic comedy .
- Overexpectations
“We will only be successful if we have as many, if not more, childhood friends, current colleagues, people we consider friends, and people who are our equals in the public sphere. We will feel that we are lucky.
Some people's lives are thousands of times better than ours, but we can feel at ease; while some people's little success can make us feel jealous and restless. It's just people who are at the same level as us, that is, our comparison group. Probably the most unbearable thing in the world is that our closest friends are more successful than us. "The meritocracy believes that if everyone can accept the same. education, and then have equal job opportunities, then even if there is income inequality or inequality in prestige in the future, it is completely acceptable, because these inequalities are basically caused by differences in people's intelligence and talents.
Therefore, Social wealth does not need to be equally distributed; some people enjoy privileges as a result of their superior intelligence, while some people may suffer so much that they can only blame themselves and blame others. Constrained by luck, constrained by the employer, constrained by the employer's profit principle, and constrained by the laws of global economic development
Workers always understand, and at the same time are always anxious that their identity is not guaranteed - their identity depends not only on their own Work performance also depends on the economic situation of the unit; they are merely tools to produce profits and will never be as focused on their own needs as they are on an emotional level."
After digging into these reasons. , Alain de Botton traveled through the time and space of ancient Rome , ancient Greece , and medieval modern society, citing scriptures and giving his ideas from five aspects: "philosophy, art, religion, politics, Bohemia " Some antidote.
I have extracted some potentially useful methods from his antidote and from my own life.
- is associated with loneliness to a certain extent and reduces attention to and comments on other people's lives.
values his own time very much. Apart from work, he leaves all his time for family, friends, reading, and loneliness that he has the strength to care about.
I have no other time and energy to pay attention to other people, get love from family and friends, and give love.
From reading and solitude, "understand and appreciate the value of every ordinary life that rests in unattended graves. Understand and appreciate the positive people, boring people, gamers, and people behind every window." Desperate people.
- Reduce desires
After getting involved in minimalism and anti-consumerism last year, I no longer participate in various e-commerce festivals. I pack two suitcases of clothes for all seasons.
The biggest desire in life now is, Even after finishing my journey to Beijing, I went to Chengdu to give myself a study room. I also knew that the source of all my anxiety now is that I have not saved enough money to build a study room for myself.
Maybe what we really care about and want is just that when we are dying. Someone can love you like a sick child. In a hundred years, all these people in front of us, all their money and power, will be gone.
- A life that is completely free of status anxiety will basically not exist.
" To appease the anxious, the best. Not by telling him that everything will be fine, as optimism teaches us—rather, by telling him that everything will eventually go terribly wrong: roofs will collapse, banks will be in ruins, We will die, everyone we love will die, and all our achievements and even our names will be buried deep in the ground.
However unpleasant status anxiety may be, it is difficult to imagine a better life that is completely free of status anxiety.
Identity anxiety is what we must do when we acknowledge the public differences between successful and unsuccessful lives. The price paid. "
If you can't get rid of anxiety, then embrace it ~ Do you think so? 12 ~
See you in the next letter ~
Illustration cover picture of the movie "Little Forest"
