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There's a narrative that everyone now is stressed/busy/anxious – do you find this relatable? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 weeks ago by frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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Go to the 'Lifestyle' section of a broadsheet and they paint a picture that we are all struggling to deal with stress and overwhelm. This is portrayed as an unavoidable feature of modern life.

A few things make it hard to believe –

Firstly, it just doesn't square with my daily experiences. I'm not stressed out and overwhelmed, while living a pretty normal lifestyle with full-time work plus childcare and sports etc.
The stats don't bear it out. Working time has gone way down – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Average_annual_hours_per_worker – it's below 35 hours a week most places, 46.25 in the highest in that table. Yes when I worked 80 hours a week I was exhausted, but that's not the norm, and the papers talk about it like it's some inescapable trend.
Then there's the stats on TV-watching. How can it be true that modern life is hectic AND people watch telly for three hours a day?

I know this is coming across as a rant diguised as an AskLemmy question, but I have real curiosity about it.... am I the exception for not feeling busy? Is there some explanation I am missing for why people in a society with 35-hour workweeks feel busy? Do you find the 'hectic modern life' narrative relatable? Do you think people are lying about being busy for some reason, e.g. to avoid being asked to do things?

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[–] ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

No worries. I've heard (not that you said this, but in general) people say that folks are anxious just because of politics & things that don't affect them - I think that's sometimes true, but more often the politics affect people's lives directly, or at least threaten to, and that causes real stress,anxiety, and harm.

That's why I tried to tie systemic causes into my rant. Literally every single stressful thing in my life I can point back to a systemic, "political" cause. And I have it pretty freakin good, all things considered. There's a lot of folks I know who are much less fortunate who are impacted much worse by... gestures at stuff broadly

[–] frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Has the ectopic pregnancy issue you mentioned touched your life?

[–] ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 weeks ago

It makes it risky to have kids here. We have some risk factors for it. Some of our friends had a rough time, and all had to make emergency plans to leave the state if worse came to worse. They also had to be careful to hide the pregnancy since the government was talking about tracking who was pregnant to catch people who left the state to get abortions - that hasn't happened yet though. And if we left the state permanently, we'd have to do it without family support which would be hard.

So, no direct harm of course, but it has caused us to delay having kids. More than anything it causes anxiety - which is why all this stuff affects most people: not because of direct harm right now, but because it makes the future uncertain.