I guarantee most of these "high achieving high anxiety types" live with significantly less anxiety than customer service reps/bag handlers/food service workers.
The worst stress of someone's life is the worst stress of their life. It's unproductive and petty to bicker about who has it worse.
If life is stressful for anyone, regardless of status, title, age, etc. there's a good chance it's undeserved.
The takeaway is to treat people better, not dismiss their stressors as less significant.
Some people just need to harden the f*** up and quit catastrophizing every little thing.
Rather than being in a cube farm with the A/C recycling the air over and over.
Perhaps it's not scars and just the ability to make lemonade when given lemons?
I really don't want to wade into this tarpit but it was most certainly financial stability for those that I know.
You assume that this is simply a matter a making a decision and acting on it -- which for you may be true.
There are others that will find this difficult-to-impossible to achieve regardless of their intellectual desire to change. Their experience of anxiety may not be a result of "catastrophizing" or "being soft."
I guess whose fault is it but their own? We can all blame our upbringing and it definitely does affect us, but how else can you change the cycle without telling someone to snap out of it ?
An equivalent high stress environment can occur whether working in an executive office, working in a call center or selling bracelets on the street.
Learning to overcome high stress experiences is a transferrable skill regardless of the context in which it was learned.
This doesn't necessarily mean an equivalent high-stress life. The call center employee has fewer or worse options for dealing with stressors outside their job which they share with the executive.
> I need to eat.
> I need to travel.
> I need somewhere to live.
By and large these things cost money and the person who doesn't have to worry about having enough money for such things is going to have less stress in their life.
Your luxury car repair drama is fleeting. Being wracked with stress about your entire life 24/7 only lets up when your mind finds a way to squirm out of it for a minute by watching a show or powering through a package of cookies on your couch.
Stress is not equivalent across all.
Mr BMW has no idea how much his energy bill was last month, smiles every time he pays his mortgage. Single mom carries a past due balance of $800 and barely makes rent each month. Two different, not equivalent, worlds.
In general, management level decisions can affect entire teams of workers and have downstream impacts on products used by millions of people. That is a form of pressure. So is the way pro athletes can be put on the spot, and it's not like their output has huge "real world" impact.
Yeah, obviously we'd all rather have pro athlete stress than single working mom stress. But there's 0 reason to strawman what that stress is.
What's the worst stress the person you're replying to has ever experienced?
I'm very curious about how you know so much about the parent commenter's life compared to your own.
How so?
Working people haven't had a raise since 1971.
We spend twice as much on health care as any other nation, but only Peru, Brazil, and several nations in Eastern Europe had worse results from covid. All of Africa cared for covid cases better than we did.
I'm sure you can think of other issues.
My life as a radioshack wage slave began and ended when I clocked in and out. If something was fucked when we left the previous night that was tomorrows problem. It's retail, no one is being paid enough to truly care.
Doing contract work for engineers who are willfully ignorant of fire code causes me lasting stress in my soul.
Either way the biggest stress is still financial and I'll stop stressing about that when I'm dead.
Compare/contrast: "living in exurban Detroit is depressing" (= has many environmental depressors) vs "poets are usually depressives" (= depressive disorders being common among people who choose to become poets.)
We use different words (most of the time) for these two things when speaking of depression, but often aren't so careful with anxiety.
Anxiety is an internal response that can be expected to be different for different individuals under the same circumstances.
Trying to judge whether or not another individual "ought to" experience anxiety in a given situation is a matter of opinion and it has no bearing on what the other person is experiencing.
Or keep online 24 hours or spend the night mentally trying to solve an abstract issue. At 5pm they are done.
Different stresses / pressures. How many are learning a new language in their freetime just to keep employed. How many people create side projects to land employment at a coffee shop?
To compare employment how many coffee shops test if an employee can make a cup during the interview? How many people are excluded from an interview because they only made starbucks coffee at a previous position.. no way they can figure out McDonalds coffee machines.. How many are asked to go through a take home coffee making task? None..
I made minimum wage at my first job. Didn't cross the poverty line until my 3rd or 4th job years later. Things might be different now, I started after the .com crash.