Do you honestly see value in comparing scars? Does that matter in any meaningful way?

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.

The parent comment was asserting that STEM types are “high anxiety” and implicitly dismissing non-STEM people as somehow having less anxiety. I think it is fair and healthy to acknowledge that, as you say, everyone has “the worst stress of their life”, regardless of STEM-ness.

I interpreted the comment differently. I thought it was saying that the pressures and anxieties of 'high anxiety' STEM people are not necessarily representative of the average person's experience. I.e. saying that the readers of hacker news are more likely to feel the stresses of feeling the need to be hyper successful, whereas others migh on average be more well adjusted

This is what I meant indeed

I don’t think it dismissed non-stem people, but there is plenty of data supporting anxiety correlates with intelligence. It is not surprising that HN is an anxious group.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3269637/

Do you honestly not see how your own narrative could be seen as dismissive to the vast majority of the world? And yes, I do see value in comparing scars, as do most people who do not reside in the high tower. I understand the social rift between you and I is comparable to living on a different planet, and I forgive you for not getting that, but others may not. Please just understand that our current situation is particularly perilous and likely will not last long. I hope you are prepared and able to cope with greater stressors.

The physical experience and effects of enduring a stressful environment is the same for everyone regardless of who they are, where they're from, or what they are doing.

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.

> An equivalent high stress environment can occur whether working in an executive office, working in a call center or selling bracelets on the street.

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.

...period. Just because you are overly stressed out about your BMW/Tesla repair saga doesn't mean it is equivalent to someone who NEVER has enough money for basic nessesities.

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.

I don't think "BMW repairs" is the main source of stress for high income people lol. I don't know whether it is fair to compare stressors across such different groups, but regardless I don't think it's fair to caricature what high income workers might be stressed about. One of my friends that happens to drive a BMW is a cardiac surgeon, and when he gets stressed over work I can guarantee you it is not about financial implications.

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.

> our current situation is particularly perilous

How so?

Our leaders are attempting to start a nuclear war, after twenty years of disastrous wars that have enriched armaments manufacturers while murdering millions of innocents.

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.

What's the worst stress you've ever experienced?

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 many of the people claiming that it's "all the same" ever actually talk to any of the low-status people? I mean, where does your knowledge come from?

I honestly see value in having scars, both the physical and mental varieties. Scars create resilience. We saw this during the recent pandemic. The upper-middle class "high achieving, high anxiety" types who had never faced any real danger or hardship were the most likely to panic and demand all sorts of ridiculous lockdowns and mandates, even though the vast majority of them were never at any significant risk. Whereas blue-collar workers and those accustomed to engaging in physically dangerous activities were generally much more sanguine and level-headed about the whole thing.

Some people just need to harden the f*** up and quit catastrophizing every little thing.

There is no evidence that scars are an inherently better tissue than non injured tissue. Torn ligaments, cut tendons, skin marring from burns, etc… these don’t bounce back 110% from their original.

You missed the point there. Going though hardships and injuries (to an extent) builds mental resilience and the ability to accept risks without succumbing to irrational panic.

Im not missing the point. The OP was making a wrong statement as evidence for wrong conclusions.

I don't think that's why the upper middle class demanded lock downs and blue collar didn't. I think the driver was financial stability. Upper middle class likely has a nice emergency fund and could do their job from home. Essentially a nice vacation. Blue collar workers got to choose between welfare and starving.

The blue-collar construction workers and farmers that I know all though the lockdowns were stupid and ignored the rules. Financial stability or lack thereof was not the reason.

The blue collar workers reward for their scar induced mindset was to go back to work. White collar workers in large part were able to parlay the lock down into permanent work from home.

Perhaps it's not scars and just the ability to make lemonade when given lemons?

What lockdown rule could farmers possibly be breaking more than programmers did? They live on a farm usually right?

Lol have you ever been to a farm? Farmers go to social events, visit friends, etc just like anyone else. Most of them laughed at lockdown rules and kept living their lives just as before.

Which is why a million Americans died and tens of millions have long term neurological, lung or other organ damage from the disease.

Lockdowns or not, nobody could've avoided getting covid in the long term. It's just too contagious. The only way out is letting it run through the population and mutate. Flattening the curve might alleviate strain on the medical system but it also prolongs the time to benign mutations.

>The blue-collar construction workers and farmers that I know all thought the lockdowns were stupid and ignored the rules. Financial stability or lack thereof was not the reason.

I really don't want to wade into this tarpit but it was most certainly financial stability for those that I know.

Oddly, I think the population density will turn out to be a factor. Son was in Laramie for most of it and the early strains of Covid didn't do much there, I suspect because people were farther apart over unit of time.

Rather than being in a cube farm with the A/C recycling the air over and over.

Scars innately look different from healthy tissue. The lessons learned in response of trauma can likewise be maladaptive. Certainly people, especially those most self-isolated during the pandemic, could use more contact with the so-called "real world." But not everything formed as part of resilience is as it should be.

>> Some people just need to harden the f** up and quit catastrophizing every little thing.

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."

Im not trying to be argumentative, but at that point is this behavior worth encouraging?

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 ?

Sometimes it takes tough love, sometimes it takes nurturing and understanding, sometimes it takes a blend of the two, sometimes it takes an entirely different track.

Our new cultural leaders have convinced everyone to out-victim everyone else. The more of a victim you are the better.

Plot twist: our culture is defined by our collective values, not by our leaders. Leaders who tap into narratives of victimhood are only enabled to rise because enough of us like to see themselves as an aggrieved victim of oppression. Including those who see culture as something imposed on them by leaders and see themselves as a victim of cultural wars.

Culture is imposed upon people by those with power. That’s why our culture is defined by hollywood at the moment.

? The most watched news media in America is Fox News. The leading party in Congress is the Republican party. In actual statistical terms and in actual political power terms, that's the definition of mainstream, but somehow those who have the power like to pretend Hollywood has it, so they can sell a narrative of victimhood even as their culture is, just as a matter of fact, the dominant one.

Less than 2% of Americans watch Fox News, everyone else absorbs cultures from entertainment.

Why do you think that?

Because most of us can afford food for our families, even in the last week of the month.

Yeah. I did a decade where that wasn't the case. Poverty is longer and harder in southern states.

None of them make six figures while browsing HN

Those browsing HN still have sprint deadlines. Browsing HN creates more stress.

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..

How many developers clock out then go to the second job they need to make rent?

Many developers work two jobs. Many jobs prevent employees from doing this. Many employees work on free open source. Many companies try to prevent or control this. Some do it for rent, child payments, mortgage or car payments.

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.

You are talking in terms of externalities.

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.

I've done waiting/service type jobs. For me, the stress during the work period was way higher than anything in my software/business jobs. But, every night when I got off work, the stress was immediately gone. That shift was over, and the tomorrow really was new day. With my office jobs the max stress is lower, but it also never really goes away.

This is it. I never took home stress from any previous job until I got an office job. (AutoCAD Draftsman for Fire/Gas Industrial systems).

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.

I ran entire kitchens of high volume restaurants...sometimes single handedly. I loved it. I wasn't happy unless I was getting crushed. Some of my best memories are from working mothersday and getting absolutely blitzed. Compared to being a developer, I wish every god damned day I could be back in a kitchen. But the pay is absolute shite.

Taboo the word "anxiety" here — you're using it to mean "environmental stressors" while the GP is using it to mean "a psychological trait of not dealing well with such stressors, due to a higher baseline feeling of stress, and/or a magnified experience of stressors."

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.

Nurses. Lots of people around here would be in tears after attempting that job for a day.

As someone who got started as a bag handler at Winn Dixie, I can tell you I'm a lot more stressed out now managing a career than I ever was working a "job."

Winn Dixie cashier here - my first job. I’ve never counted the clock so hard, but I’m pretty sure I forgot the content of my shift the moment I walked out.

Ditto. When I left work, I really left work. Didn't think about it at all. Even the 15 minute breaks were enjoyable. I'd buy a package of Little Debbie pinwheels and flip through the damaged magazines in the breakroom. Didn't own a phone then.

As this sort of argument always boils down to privilege, I'll throw my two cents in and say probably the biggest privilege (for a regular ass middle class person) is having a parent who knows math.