Hollowness as Code for Status Anxiety

by John-Michael Kuczynski

On Snobbery, Class Signaling, and Why the Truly Busy Don’t Lament “Our Times”

There’s a whole genre of cultural criticism—some literary, some academic, some just smug—that mourns the so-called hollowness of modern life.

You know the type:

• T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

• Sartre’s Nausea

• Camus’ entire vibe

• Every young intellectual who bemoans “late capitalism” while sipping ethically sourced espresso

• And the tenured essayist who wistfully mourns the loss of deep meaning in the digital age

Their message, in essence: We have lost something. Our times are hollow. We used to have depth—now we have TikTok.

But here’s the question they never answer:What exactly did we lose?

What Did People in 1512 Have That We Don’t?

These writers never get concrete. What are we missing?

• Is it the church?

• The monarchy?

• The guild system?

• Literacy rates under 10%?

Was life really fuller when plagues wiped out cities, children died before age five, and your choices in life were “till the field” or “join the clergy”?

It’s never specified. Because the point isn’t to be accurate—it’s to signal seriousness. And more importantly, status.

Hollowness as Code for Status Anxiety

Let’s name what’s really going on:

When writers lament “the hollowness of our times,” they’re not describing a historical condition. They’re describing their own status anxiety.

They don’t feel securely respected in a plural, chaotic, decentralized age.They feel displaced by mass culture, by new money, by technology, by change.

So they take refuge in elegy. They mourn what’s been “lost”—not because it’s better, but because they knew where they stood in that world.

It’s a way to broadcast allegiance to a cultural aristocracy that no longer exists.It’s a job interview disguised as a diagnosis.

Snobbery is for the Half-Safe

Here’s the personal version.

I used to be in academia. I had a place, a rank, a certain degree of social insulation. And then—very suddenly, very brutally—that was yanked from me. I had to earn my living from scratch. No prestige. No network. Just output and consequence.

And you know what happened?

Whatever snobbery I had just vanished.

Because when you’re building something—when you’re actually fighting for your life—you don’t have the bandwidth for class-posturing. You may judge people. You may dislike them. But snobbery—the performance of taste to curry favor upward—that’s gone.

Which leads us to the real profile of the snob:

Snobbery is something junior people do to impress senior people.It is the culture of “please like me” disguised as “I am above you.”

The Henry Ford Principle

Here’s the test:

• Was Henry Ford a snob?

• Is Jeff Bezos a snob?

• Is Elon Musk a snob?

They might be egomaniacs. They might be assholes. But they’re not snobs. Because they’re not trying to impress anyone. They don’t need to signal cultural allegiance to survive.

Snobbery dies when self-reliance begins.

Let’s call this the Henry Ford Principle:

The more responsibility you carry, the less room you have for snobbery.

Conclusion

So the next time you read another thinkpiece or poem about “the hollowness of modern life,” ask yourself:

• Is this about history?

• Is it about values?

• Or is it about someone trying to secure their place in a shifting cultural order?

Because odds are, that “hollowness” they see in the world is really just the echo of their own fading status.