It is the time of the year when retail businesses stack their shelves with goodies that consumers will hopefully buy as gifts for Christmas. It is also the time when many will reflect on how year after year they change not just by getting older but also by what makes them happy and fulfilled.

A long look back over the past two millennia shows how Western civilisation has evolved. Social historians remark how richer present generations are from previous ones in the material wealth they own, the variety and quantity of food we consume, the remedies we have to cure our illnesses, the consumer goods we possess, the ever-improving longevity and the economic opportunities that are available.

This massive change in lifestyle has paradoxically brought with it a sense of deprivation that our more impoverished ancestors generally did not experience. Modern Europeans are blessed with riches and opportunities that few, if any, of our ancestors who tilled the land ever dreamt of having. However, today many fret that they do not have enough material wealth while our ancestors got by with a tiny fraction of what we have.

The reasons why individuals feel deprived have to be found in the realms of psychology. Defining what is enough in the wealth we aim to accumulate and the level of esteem from others that will make us feel happy with ourselves is challenging. This is because we often use flexible yardsticks to measure our social and material achievements.

When a close friend appears to be more affluent than us, anxiety sets in

Our medieval forefathers worked hard to accumulate enough wealth to get by. Their ambitions were modest and mainly linked to feeding their family, having a decent home and being free from nasty diseases. Our yardstick today makes us look at how people we know and whom we consider being our equals are living, what material possessions they have, how often they travel and how glamorous their lives are.

We only feel happy when we have as many symbols of modern affluence as our peers or, possibly, a little more. We all know of cases where status symbols drive mediocre colleagues at work to climb the career ladder by becoming workaholics often in a permanent state of social anxiety.

Often this anxiety is fuelled not so much by a desire to earn more money but by the need to feel esteemed as much as the people we grow with, work alongside and have as friends. We fret when we realise that our old school friends live in a better house than we do and can afford to travel for their holiday three times a year when we can only afford one trip.

Of course, many do not worry at all about people they do not know well and who are very rich. We are not even worried about how they accumulated their suspicious wealth. However, when a close friend appears to be slightly more affluent than us, anxiety sets in.

Anthropologists attribute the social anxiety that modern man is burdened with to the vast political and consumer revolutions of the 18th and 19th century. The central idea that evolved in those years was built on the notion of the innate equality of all humans and the unlimited power of anyone to achieve anything if one worked hard enough.

Up to a century or two ago, most people felt that inequality and low expectations had been viewed as normal and wise. There were, of course, a few especially in the political and business fields that aspired to be wealthy and worked hard to accumulate wealth. However, the majority resigned themselves to exploitation and discriminatory treatment. This mindset may explain why women were allowed to vote in the UK only a few decades ago.

The French Revolution with its well-known slogan of liberty, equality and fraternity sparked a change in how people perceived their role in society. This change came at a time when the Church started to lose influence on European society as people were no longer prepared to accept low status as their destiny in this life which was only a short prelude to everlasting happiness in the afterlife.

Self-esteem does not always require that we succeed in everything we do. If we do not feel humiliated by occasional failings in our lives, we free ourselves from debilitating envy, anxiety and delusions. However, if we invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not achieve it, we feel depressed and frustrated.

johncassarwhite@yahoo.com