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?

  • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    7 hours ago

    I’m busy, but that’s because I cram a lot of extra things in my life for fulfillment. I’m also fairly lucky in that I make over the median income working 30-35 hours a week. I assume you are also financially comfortable, but our experience is very different from someone who has to work 2 jobs to make ends meet.

    I half-joke that my childhood was so stressful that the stress/anxiety circuit in my brain burned out years ago. It’s probably more accurate to say that I have a solution-oriented mindset: when there’s someone wrong in the world, instead of getting anxious I start brainstorming solutions and how to implement them; if I have no solution, stressing still isn’t going to fix anything so I just focus on problems I can find solutions for.

    I’d wager most people feel more helpless than that, they see big problems in their life as immutable facts instead of temporary conditions. That certainly plays a role in how stressed/anxious they feel.