The star rating is a particularly ingenious means of sowing this anxiety. As we all learned in primary school, amounts are nonsense without units. Six, one half, eighty-seven thousand—these numbers do not mean anything unless we know what mutually agreed-upon unit they attach to: fortnights, teaspoons, furlongs, etc. But what is a star? Nobody knows. The star rating average is only meaningful in relative terms: it’s higher or lower than the star ratings other striving workers earn. In other words, user reviews situate our performance not according to some stable benchmark—such as increased production per hour worked—but within an ever-fluctuating hierarchy comprised of our peers.

This all-too-public, shifting performance grid represents but one of many tools that keep the flow of anxiety humming along under neoliberalism. Others abound, and are now such a familiar feature of our working and emotional lives that we scarcely notice how routinely they derange our basic sense of self: there’s the rollback of ongoing employment through the gig economy, the explosion of applications (LinkedIn, for instance, turns its users—even the employed ones—into constant job applicants), zero-sum performance assessments such as Barack Obama’s Race to the Top, just-in-time shift scheduling, entrepreneurial kindergartens, and many more. All of these systems encourage us to view others’ achievements as our own setbacks, to individualize completely all successes and disappointments.