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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

30 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I'm busy, but that's because I cram a lot of extra things in my life for fulfillment. I'm also fairly lucky in that I make over the median income working 30-35 hours a week. I assume you are also financially comfortable, but our experience is very different from someone who has to work 2 jobs to make ends meet.

I half-joke that my childhood was so stressful that the stress/anxiety circuit in my brain burned out years ago. It's probably more accurate to say that I have a solution-oriented mindset: when there's someone wrong in the world, instead of getting anxious I start brainstorming solutions and how to implement them; if I have no solution, stressing still isn't going to fix anything so I just focus on problems I can find solutions for.

I'd wager most people feel more helpless than that, they see big problems in their life as immutable facts instead of temporary conditions. That certainly plays a role in how stressed/anxious they feel.

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

I assume you are also financially comfortable

I have €8 in my bank account lol

[–] agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Uh, that seems like a legitimate reason to be stressed. You might just be particularly stress-tolerant.

[–] wendigolibre@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Maybe they have a great support network via family. Maybe they don't understand what life is like without a job and home.

[–] agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 weeks ago

Certainly possible. In that case I would have expected a good faith attempt to understand that those resources and conditions separate them from a large number of people having a more difficult time, but who knows.