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.)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
The author writes as though they're in a bubble with other extremely-online people. 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 thing that made me wonder the most about what burnout might actually be, in terms of a diagnostic definition, was when we headed back into winter in 2020 after a summer of lockdown, before vaccines were rolled out, and my friends and colleagues started expressing a relationship to time and the future that alarmed me. They began talking about the future as if it didn’t exist, as if their imaginative powers were gone. There was no future, there was only this moment, this week, this day, and getting through it. We could be stuck here forever was the vibe at large.
I hope it goes without saying that this author is not qualified to be diagnosing themself or their peers with C-PTSD as defined by the ICD-11. We should all be cautious against articles trying to apply serious mental health issues to broad swaths of the general population. Furthermore, it's not really fair to people suffering from severe PTSD or C-PTSD to start watering down these terms such that everyone has the same condition.
I don't think we're doing anyone a favor by redefining everything as trauma these days. The pandemic was more stressful than average and many people certainly did acquire trauma through the loss of loved ones and other extreme events. However, if we're getting to the point that merely existing through the pandemic is a traumatic experience producing C-PTSD, the real issue likely lies in one's inability to handle stress and unplug from the 24/7 news cycle.