Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first--the story of our quest for sexual love--is well known and well charted. The second--the story of our quest for love from the world--is a more secret and shameful tale. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first. This is a book about an almost universal anxiety that rarely gets mentioned directly: an anxiety about what others think of us, about whether we're judged a success or a failure, a winner or a loser. This is a book about status anxiety.