I'm surprised we're more stressed out now than humans from thousands of years ago who somehow managed to produce plenty of breast-milk, I imagine. They didn't have as much safety from foreign tribes or hungry animals, they didn't have antibiotics, anesthesia or life-saving surgeries. They didn't have access to a grocery store a short drive away.

How is a modern person so much more stressed out?

> How is a modern person so much more stressed out?

srs? lol. back in the day your concerns were food, warmth and that is about it. now it's social media, covid 19, spy balloons, nuclear war, pronoun war, civil war, market crashes, wealth disparity, climate change/refugees, toxic chemical plumes ... I mean the list goes on and on.

But they question is why does this stress everyone out. In our day-to-day lives you can basically ignore all of it, provided your basic needs are met and you are living in an environment where more of your material needs are being met. So what is it about "news" that causes more actual physical stress than local conditions?

> What is it about "news" that causes more actual physical stress than local conditions?

News is written in a way that exploits human psychological flaws. It is written in this way to gain attention. News outlets game attention because newspapers that relied on ad-revenue out competed subscription revenue models. The reason this is so is that people place relatively little important on the time value on their attention compared to the monetary value of their subscription. The reason behind this is...

> In our day-to-day lives you can basically ignore all of it

This is true for people who are able to detach from the events of the world, but that is not a universal skill.

Plus a lot of the concerns I listed are not just news you hear about - they are things people are living on a daily basis. Just the other day a guy walked into MSU, about an hour away from me, and killed a bunch of people. For some you can tune that out and carry on with your life. For others, notably people in the community or families who were directly impacted, it's traumatic.

The plume of shit in the air down in Ohio is also about an hour from me. It's not just a news story, farm animals are dying. That is someones livelihood and its indicative that the environment is toxic. That would stress you out, wouldn't it? Should I drink the water? Do I need to move? Can I move? Can I even sell my house now that the local area is toxic?

I think you can stick your head in the sand for a certain amount of time but at some point you need to come up and look around at the world we are creating and become proactive instead of just watching it crumble.

You've clearly never been hungry and cold.

EDIT: I'm not saying that 'modern' stressors aren't actually stressful. I'm saying that not knowing when and where your next meal is coming from or if you're surviving the winter is just as stressful.

It’s not as simple as that. I’ve been hungry and cold (poor, homeless or near enough to it). I’m well off now. I stress about other things than hunger and temperature: but that stress is very real, and just as urgently felt.

They didn't have a newscaster to inform them of any of that. The only threats they knew of were ones they personally witnessed. People today worry about the climate of the planet, back them you'd worry about if you had enough firewood for the night.

indeed there was no machine-driven bombardment of (mis)information tailor made to provoke a fear/anger response

we are approaching a day when every aspect of our lives will be monitored and scrutinized for maximum social compliance and productivity.

"our records indicate you have not used your cloud connected CPAP machine frequently enough. a healthy night's sleep is necessary for maximum productivity at your place of employment. you must use this machine on average 6 hours per day or the portion already paid by your insurance will be rescinded and charged to you. a copy of this email was also sent to your supervisor"

"your smart speaker indicated that you have expressed illegal opinions while home alone, this recording has been forwarded to the Scottish criminal justice system for review"

"healthy employees are critical to our business. To that end we are issuing every employee a smart watch to help monitor and enforce our physical activity requirements to bring down our medical insurance costs"

i always come back to Deleuze's Postscript on the Societies of Control

https://www.jstor.org/stable/778828

Clearly then, there were no rebellions, riots, or unrest.

* * *

Our sense of fear is tuned for tigers being right around the corner. Modern society has a significant lack of tigers. The fear remains and social pressure is our new set of tigers around the corner.

Well, if the answer to "not enough food" is "throw away my baby," the answer to "get bit by a stray dog" is "guess I'll catch infection and die," and the answer to "Thag from the next cave is really rubbing me the wrong way" is "find a good stone and bash his head in before he does that to you," then... maybe... my life will be less stressful?

Whether I'd like to live like that is a different matter, of course. (Among other things, I'm convinced Thag will bash my head first, before I even notice something is wrong.)

Humans thousands of years ago had the support of their entire community. A modern human can maybe rely on their spouse. Life as a rugged individual is stressful.

At some point, you realize, "anything could happen, at any time, and I will die, or my child will die, and there's no point in stressing about it possibly happening, because I can't control it." Once it really sinks in, you just learn to appreciate what you have today because it can disappear tomorrow.

Also, do they need to deal with phone notifications, or a boss demanding something right now? There are very few things that demand an immediate now in their lives compared to ours.

There's many dimensions to this but I think the simplest answer is: Stimulation. I live in a big city where I'm always surrounded by noise, stank and people I don't know. It is never really dark outside. Most of the day I'm staring at a screen, with a window to a huge world of other people. While I have an 8 hour work day, there's an implicit assumption of doing more. And that's not bringing food on the table, including commuting/shopping/cooking, I'm already at an 11 hour day of just grinding. And then it's hard not to compare yourself to people doing better than yourself if there's a million of them around you.

I think the 'natural' internal representation of the world is that of a story. Today's stories are downright deranged. What's worse is that many of them are true so we have to internalize them.

Fuck Lovecraft, but I think he was right. It's not our job to know everything about everything, all the time. But that's what we're incentivized to do.

Just imo, humans thousands of years ago didn’t have media that informed them instantly of every horrible thing that can, and does, happen. There were also fewer humans (which I find contribute a lot to my own daily stress).

Maybe thousands of years ago humans were just blissfully ignorant of the dangers that existed?

I think there's a pretty good reasons the gods of myth are capricious and angry. It's not that people weren't aware of the problems of the world, they were just ascribed to deities.

Because people in power have decided the only way to get everyone else to work is to keep them under constant threat of losing those things.

we're more chronically stressed now, which is the stress we are less adapted to. acute stress (followed by relaxation) is not only better than chronic stress, its better than no stress at all.

Infant mortality right before the 20th century, even in the UK and US, was staggeringly high - yes, a lot of that was childhood diseases that we now have vaccines and better sanitation against, but much of it was also “failure to thrive”. Expectant mothers not getting quite enough to eat? Nursing mothers not getting enough to eat, having to do other labor (paid and unpaid) to care for themselves and the rest of the family?

Sounds like a pretty poor example, wasn't "UK right before the 20th century" one of the worst places to live across all of human history ? (Read : median person : so poor Londoner.)

I would say that modern stressors, while each not as stressful as many of those present early in humanity's history, are both far more numerous and omnipresent. Many are arguably less actionable, too — there are many things one can do to help reduce chances of food hardship or being eaten by a tiger but almost nothing we can do to e.g. radically change our economical standing or influence national or global politics. That's not to mention things like the pressures of expectations from family and friends, competition from peers, etc…

All of these stressors amalgamate into a chronic "fuzz stress" that has no form and no distinguishable source that constantly sits in the back of the minds of the collective public and is very difficult to expunge because doing that would require addressing all of the individual contributors, which is for all practical purposes impossible without sweeping societal change.

> they didn't have antibiotics, anesthesia or life-saving surgeries. They didn't have access to a grocery store a short drive away, or a fire department.

They wouldn't even dream about these things, so they weren't unhappy because of it.

You can't feel like you need something if it doesn't exist (in your era at least).

Today we still don't have casual space travel, time travel, the elixir of life or the wonder drug, but it's not the lack of these things that is making us unhappy.

Physical activity reduces stress and we have never been less active and more obese as a society.

Chronic stress is one of many, many reasons listed. It's confirmation bias to go into something looking for a particular answer.

more the inverse. my hypothesis is stress is high in society and there are many unknown effects. this is potentially one of the many effects.

> my hypothesis is stress is high in society and there are many unknown effects.

Exactly. You have a prior hypothesis about stress. This article makes a brief mention of stress and you take it as evidence of your hypothesis even though the article doesn’t support that at all.

here's the paper cited in the article..?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-90980-3

How is society is profit and growth driven?

Presumably OP is talking about Western societies, in which the dominant form of getting sustenance involves making money, which in turn involves following business incentives.

There are a giant number of people employed by the public sector where I'm from. Not everything is the private sector, and a lot of the private sector is not about relentless growth and profit.

It's deeper than private vs. public. It's more about the "employed" bit.

For a very long time, helping your community and being involved in it meant you got to eat. That's no longer the case. It's perfectly viable to clock in, say nothing to anyone, clock out, repeat. It's also possible to give all you can to your community and starve to death.

The survival strategy is no longer "seek community" but "seek profit", because human society is now more dangerous and rewarding than the natural environment.

It's the nature of a capitalist society. It's right in the definition.

> an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit.

Defining an economic system as growth and profit driven is sort of tautological though, given the definition of "economics":

> The branch of knowledge concerned with the production, consumption, and transfer of wealth.

Original question was about "society" which is sort of nebulous, but I think (hope?) most people wouldn't define their relationships with their family and close friends, or with most of the world around them, through the lens of an economic system, be it capitalism, communism, mercantilism or feudalism.

You make it sound like there is a difference between capitalism and human nature, but there really isn't. Capitalism is merely an institutionalised expression of the latter, hence its longevity.

Humans by their very nature possess the instinct to outcompete their rivals as a result of millions of years of evolution. Anyone who was not like that, was removed from the gene pool by those who were either by taking their resources or by outright murdering them.

longevity? uh... no. capitalism is very young in human society.

for clarity, feudalism lasted twice as long as capitalism has currently existed.

and while competition has dominated the scientific and cultural narrative for a while, that's not the exclusive interpretation, or even necessarily the best or correct one.

I have to ask what do you mean by capitalism then?

Was the blacksmith selling the products of his labor to people in the community not capitalism?

What exactly do you mean by capitalism?

In the sense that most people were manorial serfs and didn't use money and also the merchant class was despised by the ruling landowner/warrior class before they were overthrown by the merchants around 1800.

Now, sure, that manorial land was technically the means of production, and those in charge of these manors technically owned it (maybe much more like we are used to in civilizational phases, like with the Roman empire ?), but isn't this really stretching the intuitions we have around "capitalism" ?

personally, i adopt the marxist analysis of capitalism being a particular mode of production where private productive property is owned and controlled by the owners/shareholders and labor is exchanged for wages.

if we are going to make a distinction between feudalism and capitalism, surely we can similarly make a distinction between capitalism and X, instead of simply defining capitalism uselessly as "free markets" or "human nature." it's inclusive of the institutions which uphold these relations.

The line from that article is a poor interpretation of that study.

The study says, "Psychosocial stress may affect the composition of breast milk via several pathways."

If I'm reading it correctly, a single sample was taken from 146 women. Breastmilk composition tends to be higher in fats and carbohydrates in the first few weeks of life and varies by time of day[1]. It's highly variable (even within a single feeding) in composition, depending on many factors, like if an infant is sick and their age.

Breastfeeding duration seemed like it may be negatively associated with cortisol in school age children in one study[2]. If that's the case, the best thing a mother in a stressful environment can do is breastfeed.

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33017792/ 2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355137223_Breastfee...