By FRANCES GRANT
In the Oscar-winning film American Beauty, a dissection of US suburban life in a culture of rampant consumerism, one of the teenage characters expresses her greatest fear: to be thought of as ordinary.
This fear of being a nobody permeates Western culture, according to British author and thinker Alain de Botton, who has made a television documentary series of his latest book, Status Anxiety (TV One, 9.35pm).
Why is it, he asks in his introduction, that in an age when people in the Western world have never had so much wealth and opportunity, there has been no equivalent increase in our happiness?
Why do we invest so much of who we are in the opinion of others and why do possessions, once acquired, bring us so little satisfaction?
In this three-part documentary, de Botton promises us an analysis of these problems and some solutions. He claims that we fret and consume for love: we have not quite got over the unconditional love most of us experienced as children from our parents.
Keeping up with the Joneses is not so much about material things as what owning them says about our status in society. We amass signs of our success and importance so that we will be loved by the world around us.
De Botton, a populist intellectual who has written a clutch of best-selling books, distils philosophy, literature, art and history - the Western cultural heritage - into an informative and instructive tonic, intended to soothe those wrestling with dissatisfaction or plagued by self-doubts and feelings of failures. He describes his quest as a search for cultural wisdom to combat the problems of the times.
Those who have seen his philosophy series Philosophy - A Guide to Happiness (which has just finished on Saturday mornings on TV One), will be familiar with his style: the energy and visual panache of a Robert Winston, and an enthusiasm which reminds of telly art historian Sister Wendy - perhaps the clerical note comes from de Botton's vicar-ish look and demeanour in delivering his homilies.
Status Anxiety is part travelogue - the documentary, made for Britain's C4, obviously had a budget which would inspire status envy in many a factual film-maker's heart.
De Botton whizzes off to the home of modern democracy and corporate consumer culture, the United States, in search of answers to such questions as why we feel no envy for people whose wealth or success is far beyond us, such as Bill Gates, but save it instead for those closest to us on the social scale.
His odyssey starts in the footsteps of 19th-century French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville, who saw the seeds of future problems in the New World's limitless opportunities and the expectations of even the poorest of its citizens.
De Botton's investigations into the American - and by implication the rest of the West's - obsession with success and fear of failure takes him from the politics of Washington to the heartland, where motivational speakers and Christian evangelists earn millions with the message of prosperity for the taking.
He explores the dark side of the American dream: if financial achievement is available to anyone who strives for it, then poverty is a condition which is also deserved.
Along the way he quotes historians, psychologists, philosophers, theologians and interview subjects range from Washington lobbyists to the homeless. One of his most interesting forays is into religion, churches where the traditional Christian message of consolation to the low status - that the poorest person can be the richest spiritually - has been turned on its head.
While de Botton's books have come in for a fair share of hammering for their reduction of complex ideas to easily digestible aphorisms, his style is eminently suited to television.
Think of it as the factual companion show to The Insiders Guide to Happiness - or lack thereof.
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.
Latest from Lifestyle
Heather Mills: ‘I lost my leg, had a million illnesses. You just carry on’
The former model and ex-wife of a Beatle on saving herself... and her vegan food empire.