STRESS!!

[Ken]

I think the language of stress as a psychological condition is probably relatively modern and didn't really start until maybe the 20th Century.

But I think people have always experienced stress even if they didn't exactly have a name for it in the past. Life in the past was certainly stressful and in many ways, people in previous generations and centuries had more reasons to be stressed out than we do today. We had wars, pandemics, crime, economic depressions and so forth. And there was much less of a safety net in previous centuries. My great grandfather lost 3 separate farms in the early part of the 20th Century and had his wife (my great grandmother) was frequently hospitalized for long periods of time due to respiratory illness and tuberculosis (I think). That isn't a stress-free life.

Probably the biggest difference today is all the instant communication. We are just aware of many more things going on at once. And electronic communications means that our problems follow us everywhere 24/7 when that wasn't the case long ago.

[Sliceitup]

I think that we have the ability to know about far too many things currently, and I’m not sure our psyche was made for this. Example: on any given day a person can see up to date news headlines about bombings in multiple countries. We can be in multiple group chats, all with varying levels of information being discussed. (And what gets discussed? Is it the mundane, or is it the bad things in our life?) A spouse or child can text us, literally in real time, as they’re going through something difficult. That tension and stress doesn’t get uploaded to us around the dinner table, it arrives by the minute.

It’s not that those things didn’t happen before, we just didn’t get as many details, or even a fraction of that info, even 20 years ago.