Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

> is because all those support systems: family, friends, and local communities (religious or otherwise), have all degraded so severely.

I disagree! There was never a good support system at all. We used to just man up and live with it. Now that stress is reaching it's new heights. We can't cope with it.

I'm very curious as to how you come to the conclusion that 'stress' has increased. I don't suppose it's that the world is more stressful, WWII, cold war, a thousand famines throughout history, what makes us so stressed that we can't cope in some way that we used to be able to cope?

I have wondered - but have no evidence either way - if the stress we encounter nowadays differs to stress of the past. At some point very long ago most of us were stressing about things like food, water, surviving the night. Now most of us are stressing about things like work pressure, debt, global disasters. I wonder if the nature of the stressors have changed from immediate and acute to increasingly abstract and chronic? And potentially, if the quality of life profile is different in the two cases due to different coping mechanisms?

Very anecdotal which makes me think this: immediate physical stressors like exercise are uncomfortable but I get through them fine. Chronic stressors like climate change are totally ruining my quality of life.

I think you are right with chronic vs immediate stressors.

Economic anxiety could be the big one, and people don’t see the end of the tunnel.

I have this personal theory that some time after an external stress-related impulse (be that negative - ww2, cold war, becoming paralyzed, etc, or positive - inheriting money, winning the lottery, not having to work for the rest of your life, finding the love of your lufe, etc), the brain adjusts and one comes back to the baseline of their perceived normal stress level. And that’s why we see people who are always happy and seemingly stress free despite having nothing, and ones that always seem stressed to the max despite having everything

We just suffered at that time and prayed. Today we suffer and work together.

Also people used to smoke and drink a lot of alcohol. So it's possible that stress has objectively decreased, yet subjectively increased, as we are more aware of it.

But yeah it's an interesting question, and with the Internet as well. The 1980s world I grew up in as a kid (in Czechia) was more dangerous than the Internet-focused world of today; yet young people seem to be more stressed by the latter.

I’m sure I’ve heard of research along these lines, and indeed searching for something like “modern stress versus…” finds some work, such as https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8832552/

Medieval peasants didn't see the end of the tunnel either. I'm skeptical that the type and quantity of stress is really worse now.

That depends on the time frame. Tobacco only spread beyond the Americas in the 16th century. And really poor people have never been able to afford much tobacco or alcohol; those are luxury products.

When you eliminate problems in people's lives, they do not suddenly feel that they have no problems. Instead they lower the bar for what they consider a problem. If the bar gets lowered too far, suddenly the previously minute things are problematic and there may be many of them.

Stress is caused by our internal perspective of our problems, not by some external unchanging measure of it.

chronically worrying about climate change is no different than chronically worrying about death. it's simple, stone age, existential fear.

ancient men and women coped with existential fear by either embracing that everything is a cycle, or inventing some semblance of immortality by raising children or believing in life after death.

I guess I have no stress about climate change because it seems very normal to me that society and biosystems occasionally collapse. The stress comes from thinking there's something that can be done to stop it, and feeling that you're unable to achieve it. Maybe that's me throwing my hands up and accepting death instead of trying to stave it off, I just want to throw out there that the stress is self imposed, not environmental.

Most of our suffering is in our imagination (Seneca) and our imaginative lives have never been as big as today. The world we think we live in has never been as big. The lives we think we could live have never been as many. The bad things that could happen to us are so much more plentyful and destructive than the bad things that do.

At least they knew that this was temporal but heaven would be eternal. There was a point to things. When you stand for nothing you fall for everything. There's no story left in which we play.

Medieval peasantry times may already be well into the "abstract chronic stress" period. Humans have been around a while.