Long-term stress is the default mode of the 21st century | Hacker News Reader

Long-term stress is the default mode of the 21st century

thebrave.substack.com

107 pointsyorkiebar54 comments

"The very structures, processes which keep the lights on, our economies running and our governments functioning create the conditions which remove people from experiencing nature, the unexpected joy of boredom and developing strong social and community bonds."

This reminded me of Maker's Schedule vs Manager's Schedule and how this is largely a result of packing our calendars into hour to hour increments Monday - Friday stuck in this rotisserie motion. Empty your calendar and see how you can experience "the unexpected joy of boredom" and randomness – maybe you'll visit the beach tomorrow and still get more done in a half day than you do in a week.

http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

I made the mistake of applying the hourly schedule to my personal life and it's horrible.

I had to always update my calendar seems things never go as planned. I also was having anxiety even in my off days since I feel that I have to "hit" the schedules planned out in my calendar.

I’ve tried and backed off the same idea. Funny enough, I also recently read that Cal Newport strictly advises people not to use time blocking for their after work schedules for similar reasons.

Existential dread is like the background radiation of stress for this era - the constant worry that the climate will change more rapidly than anticipated, that reified systems will collapse, that unrest and chaos will spread.

Add to that the expectation of constant availability and instantaneous response, the expectation of unmitigated success, the expectation of having a soaring career and being a good parent and impressing your (global) peers and presenting a flawless life in every aspect.

Add to that the faceless systemisation of processes and functions that once had a human face (getting a loan, buying a home, screening for employment, the passing of judgment), and the dehumanisation of human affairs.

It honestly amazes me that humans are so far, en masse, proving relatively resilient under this relentless cudgelling, but I wonder how long it can last. Not much longer, I fear.

While all of the things that you listed are real and actual reasons to be stressed out, it's not like life was less stressful in the past. Just thinking about the history of my own country, your average Pole in the 20th century had to worry

1) whether they can even speak their own language as under Prussian-Russian-Austrian occupation it wasn't allowed under harsh punishment, you could only learn Polish history and language in hiding

2) The restoration of independence after WW1 came with reshuffling of land ownership, so you might have had to abandon all your posessions to move somewhere else

3) general shitty conditions all the way until WW2

4) WW2, 2.4 million Poles killed because they were "the wrong race" and just happened to be in an attractive geopolitical location

5) WW2 ends, but we get 40 years of communism instead. Now your daily worries include whether you get a government-assigned job on the other side of the country so you don't get to see your family, and secret police coming to disappear you for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. General shitty conditions unless you follow the party line.

In comparison to that, life in the 21st century is "honey and mead" as they say. Yeah sure young people struggle with climate change and buying a house like everyone else, but it's not like the lives of their ancestors were any less stressful(and most likely more so).

> your average Pole in the 20th century had to worry whether they can even speak their own language as under Prussian-Russian-Austrian occupation it wasn't allowed under harsh punishment, you could only learn Polish history and language in hiding

This is an incredible overexaggeration. Polish was the language spoken on an everyday basis by the vast majority of Poles during the 19th century. It was the language that would ordinarily be used in the marketplace or shop or when talking with one’s Roman Catholic priest and fellow parishioners. It was the language that laborers spoke to each other all day every day at work. Yes, Polish was not a prestige language; official usage and the intelligentsia functioned in Russian or German. And there was definitely heavy censorship of publications during the Tsarist era which required an underground Polish-language education system to teach Polish nationalist history and Polish as a literary language, but the masses weren’t banned from speaking their native tongue.

In the last century, people were all worried about nuclear armageddon. This was not an idle fear, see the Cuban Missile Crisis. And, of course, there were all the global wars.

I find it strange that people think this century is uniquely stressful.

My theory, unencumbered by evidence, is parents have successfully removed all chance of failure, injury, risk and need for effort from children, and so children never learn to deal with adversity. Eventually, the kids are old enough to face problems their parents can't insulate them from, and they have no coping skills.

"I find it strange that people think this century is uniquely stressful."

Probably because people talk about it far more than they used to - which is a good thing. However, I also suspect social media also layers on a whole news ways for people to get stressed.

people talk about their present day more than the past at every point in the past. It's a human condition to think that right now is the most important time ever. Take every point in history and at that point the people would think that the point they are living in is the most important time.

History gives perspective.

I find the sort of 18-25 internet culture that exists on other platforms is full of "look at how depressed I am lol just kidding" kinds of posts. It's like an amplifier for dragging people down, and this year social media in general has effectively given every rabid doomer a megaphone to spout (mostly unsourced) doom and gloom like a million funeral bells ringing constantly in your face. No wonder rates of depression are up!

I grew up under the threat of nuclear armageddon, which was a super-scary binary willtheydropthebombornot one day end of the world. The difference for me is that catastrophic system collapse due to carbon-emission-driven global heating is in progress, unstoppable, and something that will happen over a much longer period of time.

(Apparently the threat of nuclear armageddon is as high as it has ever been, too: https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/ )

The doomsday clock doesn't mean anything anymore, at least for atomic war. They started including global warming as a metric in where they set the clock so it's much closer than where it would be by nuclear risk alone.

For example we're at 100 seconds to midnight, closer than the 2 minutes during the Cuban missile crises, which is total nonsense

I'm a bit surprised by the down votes, it would be nice to have some comments for discussion...

To clarify I'm not saying that climate change isn't a critical thing to address, I'm just saying that the doomsday clock is no longer a measure of how imminent nuclear war as the parent thread mentioned.

Yes I do think it's ridiculous that the doomsday clock is closer to zero now than during the Cuban missile crises. I don't think this is a very controversial statement. Would be very nice to get some comments rather than just downvotes.

Well, when it was instituted, Nuclear Armageddon was the existential threat to humanity, and therefore that was the metric they chose. Everything else paled in comparison. They weren’t hugely aware of the threat that things like climate change, or trophic cascades, could present. They were pure hypotheticals.

They didn’t, however, call it the “Nuclear Armageddon” clock, rather the doomsday clock, because the point was tracking that overarching threat to the continuation of the human species.

As we have now recognised that there are other categories of threat which are potentially civilisation-ending, we, in my opinion rightly, include those in the metrics of the probability of doom.

Climate change is like having a slow growing but untreatable cancer. It’s going to get you, unless something unexpected and drastic happens. It may even get you sooner than you expect - right now we are tracking the upper bounds of every model, and the worst case scenarios are consistently getting worse.

So, nay, it no longer tracks the sole threat of nuclear Armageddon, but I think the estimation of how close we are to midnight is pretty accurate.

> Existential dread is like the background radiation of stress for this era - the constant worry that the climate will change more rapidly than anticipated, that reified systems will collapse, that unrest and chaos will spread.

That's not existential dread.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism#Angst_and_dread

Existential dread is not used in the sense of Existentialism but in the sense of existence.

So rather than:

Existentialism -> dread it is instead

existence -> dread

I’ve never been satisfied with the definition of stress. My dad always said “If things are going good, that means you’re not trying.”

How do you reconcile normal challenges and hardships in life with what is defined as “stress”? In some ways, life without stress is boring and uneventful. At the same time stress is a negative thing that affects your health. It’s not clear to me what is defined as stress - I’ve read number of medical definitions and they all sound vague and unsatisfactory.

Can’t one define ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ stress? For example, stress experienced when learning something challenging would be useful stress, while ruminating about issues we have no control over would be useless stress.

I never feel stressed about a really annoying and thorny programming problem, no matter how frustrating it is or seemly insurmountable it is. Ditto for learning anything new.

Yet, I would feel stressed about grades and passing, which is entirely different from actual mastery.

A difficult programming problem in isolation is something I, too, enjoy.

There's no enjoyment though when the project manager (any other exec) demands that it be solved within a very short time. This is no time for eustress, when I'm being asked for status updates twice a day for 5 days.

I’ll give it a shot.

Useful stress is something you can relieve through action. You study and learn the thing, and pass the test. Or you have that difficult conversation. Once you go through it, you feel a sense of pride and accomplishment (sorry).

Useless stress is what you feel when you’ve think you’re going to lose your job, or a loved one is sick, or a brush fire is burning a mile away from your house. It’s out of your control and the stress you’re under can’t be harnessed in a useful way. It just sucks.

I like this clarification.

If you work out for half an hour and then get off the treadmill, you feel great and accomplished. This is a manageable amount of stress.

But for comparison, imagine if you have to run on that treadmill day after day after day, only getting off for regimented breaks and the bare minimum amount of rest required, and you are only allowed two weeks of vacation a year and then it's back to the treadmill. And if you ever stop running on the treadmill, you lose your house and ability to feed yourself and provide care for your family... It gradually wears your soul down to a nub.

Yes, that's called "overtraining". :)

> And if you ever stop running on the treadmill, you lose your house and ability to feed yourself and provide care for your family...

Not to mention: if, in a moment of weakness, you slow down on a treadmill, braking braces on your legs kick in and start giving resistance, making running harder. Thus any kind of slack or mishap becomes a permanent handicap.

This... plus there’s a time element too.

New challenges that one faces might be physiologically stressful, but if they are within your scope to meet and overcome, can also be incredibly motivating - aka ‘good stress’.

In my view they become ‘bad stress’ if they are either prolonged (thereby wearing your resilience down) or due to your circumstances you have no power or opportunity to meaningfully meet and overcome them.

You can also look at how it influences you, like bad stress in making you unable to cope and can cause some mental health issues. At one point there can be just too much, in dog training that is called threshold and individuals have their own capacity. So 3 life events that you would handle no problem separately, could be way worse when they happen at once.

This article gives a fairly scientific exploration of the biology of stress: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2844123/

Actually in psychology there is exactly that distiction between two types of stress: Eustress and Distress.

The first, eustress is what you could call 'positive' stress, stress that you can cope with and that induces change, growth, and learned experience.

The second, Distress is stress that is too much for you to cope with either in type or intensity, it's the type of stress that would likely trigger a physical flight or fight response and all the health issues associated.

The distinction is tenous but the point is stress is sort of needed, just has to be in a dosage that you at an individual level can cope with.

Exercise just doesn't register as stress to me, although you could call it stress.

For me, stress is about negative outcomes.

It's fine to have personal definitions, but if something is regularly called "stress" in medical literature then it's not strange that people will use that definition in online discussions as well. :)

Good point. When I learned about the concept of “eustress” and how it contrasts with “distress”, it gave me a better understanding of how I handled varying types of difficult situations.

Eustress is basically stress that improves your performance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustress

When someone talks about stress it's normally because they are overloaded. At that point they cant cope. This overload leads to various medium and longer term mental health issues.

So practically, when we talk about stress we are normally talking about our inability to cope with inputs and the expectations of output! :-)

Source: Am someone with ADHD that sees a Psychologist :-)

> In some ways, life without stress is boring and uneventful

Thing is, maybe a boring and uneventful life is all some people want. That doens't mean that nothing should happen at all, but what's the point of enduring constant stress if there is no "boring and uneventful" phase between one stressful event and the other? The boring part should be the default state and the ultimate goal you work towards during stressful times.

It's like saying that everyone should work not because they need money to survive, but because "life without work is boring". I, for one, would do perfectly fine without that daily task, thanks.

A few lines that help me:

Stress is when you're responsible for something you cannot actually control. Anything else might be pressure or life. But if you cannot control it, you can't actually be responsible for it...

As one of the great philosophers of our time, Whitney Cummings, puts it: "let go or be dragged".

Enchiridion of Epictetus: https://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/dep/dep102.htm

Interesting, thanks!

There is "chronic stress" which is caused by unanticipated events, is short term, but nevertheless helps you grow character and get stronger mentally. Then there is "acute stress" which is akin to death by a thousand cuts, which was designed to be activated only in truly stressful situations like fleeing from a tiger, but this has become the norm in our modern jobs.

Is it the default mode of the 21st century, or is the 21st century just the first century we've done extensive research into stress psychology (or at least, extensive research not for the sake of confirming a narrative/bias)?

There is physical and emotional stress, the levels of physical stress upon the body has in this century become less so due to automation and working conditions/standards. Though whilst we have reduced physical stress, we have offset that with emotional stress. One which for some they manage to reduce via going to the gym, exercising and other forms of physical stress.

I would have thought that stress levels would be worse in the - say - 18th Century - widespread disease risk, no pain relief for surgery, realistic prospect of starvation, wars etc etc. Or perhaps people had a more fatalistic attitude?

Yes, you have long term stress in the 21st century, but for those of us lucky enough to live in the 1st World, it's not usually existential stress.

Ah, the good old 20th Century. Two massively destructive world wars. Perfectly awful working conditions for those in heavy industry for at least the first third. Appalling conditions in Russia and China for a great deal of it. Famines and mass dislocations in the Indian subcontinent.

It's possible the subjective experience could be harder for those living now, even as the objective one has gotten better.

Society doesn't teach coping well; and while it's still rare there are growing segments that actively disparage the idea of coping when the stressor is something they want "fixed."

Furthermore most media and advertising rely on stirring up disquiet to grow their audience.

Yeah, no. While it's true that modern upper middle class anglosphere urbanites torture themselves with completely optional neurotic bullshit, most of the rest of the world is pretty relaxed and may even experience a higher standard of living.

I have family members who benefit from my financial support thanks to my being a tortured neurotic modern urbanite. I won't get any of the "big bucks" in the US if I unplug or relax too much, now will I?

If you think checking in on your phone 200 times a day and worrying about everything your ipotato tells you to worry about is helping feed your family: whatever works for you, pal. That sort of mentality never worked for me.

Ya, it’s interesting how materially ‘poor’ countries have citizens with more enjoyable lives (by any subjective measure, because you can’t objectively measure how someone is feeling).

I wonder if that is only the case for the 21st century.

Buddhists have been looking at how to live an awesome life for thousands of years now.

And the main theme they have been tackling right from the start was how to not worry and reach calmness of the mind.

We support ever more people not working. That means workers have to work harder for a smaller share. So workers suffer long term stress. So more of them drop out of work and the problem gets worse...

> That means workers have to work harder for a smaller share

what if the "whole" is not const? Does it necessarily mean that the share is smaller? I'm not convinced

We are slowly automating jobs out of existence and increasing efficiency of existing processes. Nothing to do with everyone burning out.

You have 3 people working an 8h day. You automate away half that work. So 3 people are now applying for 1.5 jobs. You give one of them the job and he has to work 12h a day. The other two are unemployed. Everyone is stressed, 2 people for lack of money, 1 for exhaustion and fear he'll lose his job to the other two if he doesn't give it 110%.

Kaynes thought we'd keep all three workers for 4h a day and pay them more for the privilege of working part time. But that isn't how markets work. And that's the problem we now face.

- If people are overworked and the employer can get away by burning out every employee, then the unions are not doing their job properly.

- If less people are required to do the same amount of work, it means you're automating sucessfully, and that you should tax automation to compensate. Having an automated robot/script working 24/7 shouldn't relieve the company from its inherent social responsibilities.

- If the above is not happening, the people in charge are failing their job or acting in bad faith, and should be replaced and held responsible in either case.

You look at this like a bug to be fixed. But it's actually a feature. If you're not a (would be) worker, and most people aren't (let alone the groups our political system empowers) then the harder those workers work and the less they're paid and the more they're afraid they'll lose their jobs the better!

50 years of rising income taxes, higher student fees, reduced job security, union decline, reduced services for working people etc etc etc are the other side of the coin to rising asset prices and ever higher subsidies for land owners.

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