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Notes -
My impression is that historical nobility had a lot of status anxiety too! Not just status, but plain finances to boot.
We're used to the economy consistently growing, at a pace legible to human perception. This is a historical anomaly, and true in the West for maybe 400 years, and mere decades in other places.
Before this, it was very difficult to grow the pie. You were more concerned about slicing it up such that the children didn't starve. Look at the practice of primogeniture, or sending second sons to the navy. The family farm or even ducal holdings never seem to multiply, and if you slice them too fine, you'll be nobility in name alone.
This isn't the case any more! A smart parent, in the 20th century, could start saving and making sensible investments. You can do very well by your kids even if they turn out to be one of the dimmer bulbs in the shed.
While people may feel anxious today, even more so, that's vibes and not based on an assessment of facts or historical reality. Compound interest is a helluva drug, and might even be a better investment than sending your daughter to be an art-ho in Bushwick. The typical worst case scenario is them ending up on SNAP, not starving to death, as might have easily been the case in the past.
I can hardly predict the next decade with confidence, but I believe that money makes everything easier.
Our impression of historical stability for noble families is also heavily influenced by lying. Dishonesty and outright fraud have always been key elements of creating lineage stories. Cutting both ways!
The ancient frequency of Moses/Oedipus/Cyrus (Herodotus rather than Xenophon)/Arthur sword-in-the-stone myths likely reflects a way to incorporate peasant "risers" into existing lineages. The Hapsburgs were notorious for inventing spurious links to Caesar or Charlemagne. This occurred at lower, and less notable, levels of nobility all the time. A sufficiently rich peasant found a way to claim descent from so and so, and with the right palms greased the write documents were "verified" and no more peasant. I similarly roll my eyes at the western credulity given to claims by Oriental families to have lineages dating back before our earliest written documents, but without evidence to back it up. Accounts of nobility were always historically shaky in poorly documented societies with weak record keeping.
We now, of course, are so often treated to the opposite in America, false middle class consciousness. Republican family origin stories where dad was a "small business owner" (third generation multi-millionaire) and I worked my way through college (interned with a family friend's finance company); or the international student version where my parents were refugees (oligarchs who fled when their patron was ousted in a coup).
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