Go to the ‘Lifestyle’ section of a broadsheet and they paint a picture that we are all struggling to deal with stress and overwhelm. This is portrayed as an unavoidable feature of modern life.

A few things make it hard to believe –

  • Firstly, it just doesn’t square with my daily experiences. I’m not stressed out and overwhelmed, while living a pretty normal lifestyle with full-time work plus childcare and sports etc.
  • The stats don’t bear it out. Working time has gone way down – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Average_annual_hours_per_worker – it’s below 35 hours a week most places, 46.25 in the highest in that table. Yes when I worked 80 hours a week I was exhausted, but that’s not the norm, and the papers talk about it like it’s some inescapable trend.
  • Then there’s the stats on TV-watching. How can it be true that modern life is hectic AND people watch telly for three hours a day?

I know this is coming across as a rant diguised as an AskLemmy question, but I have real curiosity about it… am I the exception for not feeling busy? Is there some explanation I am missing for why people in a society with 35-hour workweeks feel busy? Do you find the ‘hectic modern life’ narrative relatable? Do you think people are lying about being busy for some reason, e.g. to avoid being asked to do things?

  • doleoEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    Well, I think there’s more to burnout than the simple number of hours that you work. I think it’s pretty well recognised that people have a limited capacity for activity, but also information.

    A lot has been made of how the number of hours people have as ‘free time’ has never been so high, but conversely, disaster-reporting and doom-scrolling have never been as ubiquitous as today, either.

    There are a lot of reasons why people might feel stressed in 2026. I won’t condescend by listing my evaluation of them, here. But to suggest working hours is a good metric to measure against stress levels seems like faulty logic, to me.