> 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.