Social Elevation
Rank-Based Status Anxiety
You don't want the thing — you want to outrank them.
Grounded in the research on status anxiety and social rank theory
the gist
Your sense of worth is computed by RANK, not absolutes — where you sit relative to the people around you. So you can have more than ever and still feel like a loser if your reference group has more, because the brain measures position, not amount.
the science
It links status anxiety (Alain de Botton) with the social-rank theory of mood (Price, Gilbert), where low perceived rank reliably drives anxiety and depression. The engine underneath is Festinger's social comparison theory: we measure ourselves against others, and looking up stings.