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> People who can't unplug from the 24/7 news feed and instead adopt the world's stresses on to themselves, manifesting as a never-ending cycle of stress and doom

The adopting the world's stresses seems to be something I've observed with the newer generations. No actual problem solving but merely adopting the stress which I wonder is a symptom of being overly empathetic but I can't understand why the adoption doesn't progress into actual problem solving? Is it because the average joe regardless of the generation is a bad problem solver and more unrefined free stress is bound to paralyze said joe. Or is it something else?

I tend think the problem is that the world is under-stressed.

Personal tragedy used to be unbelievably common for humans. Just consider the sheer number of childhood deaths before the year 1800.

If you are a generation that has been raised in a world with few diseases, famines, foreign invasions, and even fewer things like verbal abuse or bullying - by the time you reach adulthood you are probably much, much more sensitive to any sort of negative emotion anywhere.

It's like growing up in a zero-G environment and coming back down to Earth - you have no emotional muscles.

I agree. In prior generations, if you survived childhood you probably went to fight in a war as a young adult (if you were male) or you had a loved one who did and you had to struggle to keep things together at home. If you survived that, you had a hard life working in fields or factories until your body was so broken you couldn't do it anymore. You didn't have time to worry about the types of things that many young people have as their big concerns today.

In my experience, intentionally stressing yourself in controlled ways (i.e. with exercise) is an incredibly effective way to counteract this issue.

> Personal tragedy used to be unbelievably common for humans. Just consider the sheer number of childhood deaths before the year 1800.

While the troughs of that sorrow are undoubtedly deeper, childhood deaths in your family weren't a 24/7 stressor.

I think the issue is that people can log in to Reddit, Twitter, or even any news website and receive a constant stream of tragedy, bad news, and worry. It's no longer an exception, it's the everyday experience available on demand.

I see this come up in extremely online young people I work with: They're always invested in a new tragedy or catastrophe or drama or concern somewhere in the world, but those worries disappear and get replaced with a new one as soon as the news cycles shift. They weren't actually invested in it, they were just reacting to what they put in front of their eyes for hours per day.

This probably depends on the parent. One of my older brothers died when I was in 3rd grade. After that, the head vice was pretty much constant until my mother kicked me out at 14. Things rapidly improved after that.

> I tend think the problem is that the world is under-stressed.

I'd say that it isn't the world that's under-stressed, it's upper-middle class NYC/London feature writers. Other people still suffer plenty.

I would say it's because they are stressed about problems that are much too big for them. A single person has essentially 0 influence over politics, climate change, and social issues, yet people spend hours a day getting fed news and hot takes over these issues, on any side of the political spectrum. Surely ingesting so much of this content will impact your mental health. If it turns into some sort of productive action, that's great, but that may not be the natural response for everyone.

> I would say it's because they are stressed about problems that are much too big for them.

I have heard these described as gravity problems; problems that might be worth solving, if they are solvable at all, but which are almost certainly not the problems you should be concerning yourself with. Instead finding the right sized problems and solving them can be very satisfying.

This is not a rebuttal of what you are saying and I think your caution is valid, but your post prompted a musing about observations of my elders (all whom have now passed away.)

All of my grandparents and great aunts/uncles who lived through the great depression and ww2 (some actively fighting and some not), all the men and women seemed to be quite traumatized and in fact much of their personality seemed permanently defined by the great depression, even more so than ww2 (with the exception of one uncle who was in a foxhole during the battle of the bulge.), often to the point of irrational and even harmful decision making, including hoarding in a couple cases.

This was true even though none of them were financially ruined, forced to move, destitute or food insecure during either period.

I think cultural contagion, existential worry and trauma/coping mechanisms/adaptive personality change existed prior to the plugged in life and 24/7 news cycle (though those two things exacerbate it for sure.)

They're called life-changing events, right? :)

The daily experience you have today of being able to walk into Walmart or whatever and just buy whatever you want means that you have a certain level of confidence in life. Generally, people buy dishwashing liquid when it runs out, not weeks before with a buffer. If you had to live through a period in which you could go to the store and not find anything, or perhaps no money, or perhaps you can't go out because it's dangerous outside, etc, then you're going to treat that differently, perhaps for your entire life.

Before coronavirus happened there were a ton of things that I had planned to do during my life. They all seemed so certain, like, provided I'm in good health, I can do all of that stuff over the next few decades.

But then it was all ripped away. Not all of it came back. Not all of it _is_ coming back. And so that experience has made me far more short-termist in my outlook. Do it now while you can, etc. I think many people feel the same way.

I also think it was somewhat appropriate not to have a concrete idea of the future early in the pandemic. We didn't know what was coming. Lots of speculation turned out to be false. One scenario that was suggested very early on was a low single-digit percentage of young healthy adults being hospitalized, which could realistically have caused interruptions in basic municipal services in some places. Other scenarios were too optimistic. We really didn't know the future and couldn't make firm plans about it. Feeling that way all the time, no matter whether it's appropriate, is a symptom. Feeling that way when it makes perfect sense is not a symptom.

I'd agree with you in the general sense that people need to unplug from the news, however, unfortunately that doesn't solve the problem here.

Between 2020 and 2022 in many countries we were prevented by law from engaging in everyday activities. Even for those of us who decided to take calculated risks, life as a whole became incredibly difficult and stressful because simply talking about anything at all became a political battleground. Coronavirus became _everything_, we were following arrows around on the floor for christ's sake.

Some countries are still engaged in such practices, e.g. I'd love to visit China but it's not effectively possible; the China of pre-2020 doesn't exist. At the moment it feels as if I missed out on visiting it, potentially forever.

I lost my job during lockdown, twice, and at the moment those workplaces no longer exist. What I consider to be my career no longer exists. It may come back, but at this point I can't rely on it.

These events have been traumatic for me. I've lost a huge amount of trust in people, to the extent that making any kind of medium to long term plan seems pointless because society could simply decide to completely up-end the existing structures again.

I can plan for "there may be an infectious disease". I can plan for losing a family member. I can't plan for losing my partner, and I can't plan for "anything you want to do might suddenly become illegal with zero notice; the career you train for might disappear overnight; society may arbitrarily turn against you".

I've not been back to work since. Aside from a few events (like meeting my current partner), my life still feels as if I'm in a bad dream and I'm waiting to wake up in 2019.

> expressing a relationship to time and the future that alarmed me. They began talking about the future as if it didn’t exist

I feel a lot of affinity with this, actually. The future I trained for and built my life around disappeared.

Throw away the cell phone and get a break.