What is it?
Identity anxiety is a worry. The worry that we are in danger of not being able to keep up with the paradigm of success set by society, that the social class we are in at the moment is too mediocre, or that we will fall to a lower class.
When did it arise?
History has shown that identity anxiety develops when the basic needs of life are secured.
Anxiety for all
As long as we are in a society where we face competition and are labeled as "failures" or "successes," we are bound to develop anxiety about our identity.
Do the rich and powerful also suffer from identity anxiety? The answer is yes, because they compare themselves to others of equal status.
On the other hand
There is no doubt that the desire for status, like any human desire, has a positive effect: to stimulate potential, to achieve perfection, to discourage deviant and harmful behavior, and to strengthen the cohesion generated by social **** values.
The Causes of Anxiety
The Desire for Identity
Why do people want to be recognized for who they are? In a nutshell, it is simply to pray for wealth, fame, extended influence and love.
But money, fame, and influence can only be seen as representations of love -- or as ways of getting love -- not as the ultimate goal.
Every adult life can be said to contain two stories of love. The first is the story of the quest for sexual love, and the second is the story of the quest for love from the world. The former is widely known, the latter more hidden.
Thirsting for identity is, in fact, thirsting for the attention of others. There is an inherent uncertainty in our judgment of our own worth - our perception of ourselves is largely dependent on what others think of us.
If everyone around us ignores our existence, we become angry, then desperate, and even use cruelty to get attention.
Of course, the consequences of being ignored vary from person to person. Because some people know their own value, and to them, the eyes and opinions of others are nothing but a passing shadow, and even if they don't get attention, they don't feel anxious about their own identity or behave differently.
Snobbishness
The most obvious characteristic of snobs is not simple social discrimination, but rather a complete equivocation between social status and human value.
The word "snob" originally meant a person who had no ostentatious status. However, the meaning of the word has changed considerably in modern times to mean a person who looks down on others because they do not have social status.
A snob is concerned only with the prestige and accomplishments of others. Once the prestige and accomplishments of those he knows well change, these snobs are likely to sniff around and re-rank his so-called closest friends, thus staging a tragicomedy.
The views and positions of snobs are greatly influenced by the orientation of the newspapers. British newspapers talk every day about nothing more than the status and prestige of the aristocracy and celebrities, while hinting at the triviality and boredom of ordinary people's lives. How can people not become snobs if this is what they read every day?
The only root cause of snobbery is actually the fear that lies deep within us. We are afraid of being different, of not being as good as others, and that's why we try to befriend the richer and more powerful.
However, snobbery is a group phenomenon, and it is difficult for individuals to break free of the shackles of snobbery.
Over-expectation
This concern about having nothing is not surprising when you consider the psychological sentiment implicit in people's judgment of what is enough.
Two thousand years of Western civilization have led to similar advantages in the modern era: rapidly increasing wealth, vastly improved food production, rapid advances in scientific and technological knowledge, an abundance of consumer goods, a high degree of physical health care, and a significant increase in life expectancy.
But along with this great material abundance, there is a lingering and growing sense of "nothingness" and a fear of it!
Why do we feel this way? In fact, we never form our expectations of things in isolation, and our judgments are necessarily based on a reference group of people who we consider to be similar to ourselves. Only by comparing ourselves with them can we determine our appropriate horizon of expectations.
If our comparator group is more superior and accomplished than we are, we feel that we should have achieved more, and thus, anxiety about our identity arises.
The Cult of the Elite
Poverty is a misery in itself, and in an elite-cult society, poverty is even more humiliating.
No matter how unpleasant the anxiety of identity may be, it is still difficult to imagine a good life completely free of it, because a person's fear of failure and of being humiliated in front of others actually means that he holds a certain amount of ambition, expects certain results to come about, and has respect for others than himself.
Identity anxiety is the price we must pay when we recognize that there is a public ****ing difference between a successful life and an unsuccessful one