Status Anxiety

Canonical definition

Status Anxiety is Anxiety whose problem is set by the Mimetic Premium: the problem of securing standing, which no available action resolves because the Referent-less component of Salience has no Referent against which it could satiate and each attainment resets the comparison against which the next is measured. Status Anxiety runs on both routes of Anxiety at once: on the material route, because no attainment closes the problem, and on the explanatory route, because under Source Opacity the Mimetic urgency is experienced as necessity and the Thinker accounts for it as a threat to survival. Status Anxiety is where the route to the Futility Belief through the Mimetic Treadmill begins.