[UncleOxidant]

> but to me it seems that us the modern people are pressured much harder than previous generations.

I don't think this is even close to true. In fact we've got it pretty soft compared to many earlier eras. Think about having to wake up prior to daybreak to feed the animals, milk the cows, start fires for cooking, heating (a lot of wood chopping), etc. Having to haul drinking water. Scratching out a subsistence living. No or very minimal medical care. Lifespans in the 30 to 40 year range.

I think much of the pressure we feel is self-imposed striving to keep up with a lifestyle fantasy handed down to us by advertising and peer pressure.

[pdimitar]

Factually that's true of course but hey, at least you weren't always in debt like most of the people nowadays are. And you got to live around nature and eat actual organic food.

I am not looking to the past with rose-tinted glasses, mind you -- definitely not all of it. And I didn't mean the farm life in particular. I mostly meant the post-WW2 generation. It's well-documented (but I don't keep link because why would I) that their social upwards mobility actually did exist. Very much not the case for most modern people who are just scratching to have subsistence living as you mentioned.

Theoretically we can stretch this argument to infinity but in practice most people are not going anywhere on the social ladder for their entire lives. Let's be honest and realistic and look at how things are today.

> I think much of the pressure we feel is self-imposed striving to keep up with a lifestyle fantasy handed down to us by advertising.

You might be projecting a bit with your statement?

To me, having my own house, no debts and job / business that does not burn me out on a regular basis should not be in the league of "fantasy lifestyle", no. (Oh, and let's not even mention all technology and bureaucracy that by now it's super clear was never meant to make our lives easier.)

[UncleOxidant]

> I mostly meant the post-WW2 generation. It's well-documented (but I don't keep link because why would I) that their social upwards mobility actually did exist.

A short period of the modern era in which the US was pretty much the only nation with it's manufacturing capability completely intact after the destruction of WWII. The US also realized that funding education was important for a time after the war to retrain veterans. It's how so many people were able to get college degrees essentially for free which helped boost the economy for a generation.

> at least you weren't always in debt like most of the people nowadays are

Since it sounds like you're limiting the modern era to after 2000, it seems we can stretch things a bit and look at the era of The Great Depression as being pre-modern by that definition (I think The Depression falls squarely in Modernity, but for the sake of argument...). Mortgage debt increased 8X from 1920 to 1929. Installment debt increased at similar rates. This is far from the first generation that's taken on a lot of debt.

Yes, I agree that there are forces at work which conspire to keep people in debt, however those forces are not new. Things are made worse by the high cost of housing which is caused by constrained supply (and a greater population now putting more demand on housing), but again, I'm not sure we haven't been here before. Pendulums swing. And why are houses so much bigger now than they were in that postwar era when families were larger? That also leads to higher housing costs (some of it is demand and some of it is perverse incentives for builders to build bigger houses).

[pdimitar]

> Pendulums swing.

IMO that's the key insight in your comment. And the full swing of the pendulum from one extreme to the other can take more than one generation, essentially losing valuable wisdom and letting different generations feeling resentful towards each other.

I never claimed we have it worse in history during all of its recorded parts. I am simply saying that compared to some 60 years ago things are looking quite bleak by comparison, economically and in terms of personal well-being.

[wing-_-nuts]

Happiness and satisfaction are relative to prior experience. I started out my adult life below the poverty line on disability, and small things like fresh fruit and veg or owning my home or car feel like lavish luxuries to me. Someone who was raised with a silver spoon would consider my spartan lifestyle miserly.

[pdimitar]

This is swinging a bit too hard in the other direction IMO.

I too grew up quite poor (although not on the level of those videos about Africa and various isolated Indian villages) and nowadays I am unhappy that I can't replace all Apple tech at home in one fell swoop.

That's an extreme example to illustrate a point: it's OK to change your values and want something more (as long it's not only hedonistic and just a blind greed and hunger for more and more, of course).

[zephyr9]

It's actually a myth that agrarian lifestyle was all that difficult. We have the enduring image of the farmer up at dawn, but the reality was that people completed the day's work in a few hours and didn't do much for the rest of the day.

Capitalism has changed that a bit now though.

That 30-40 year lifespan is also a myth. High mortality brings down the average, but people's lifespan has been around 70 throughout history.

As for whether people face more psychological pressure than previous generations, yeah there are plenty of people whose job it is to record and measure this stuff, and they all seem to say it has increased. This just may not fit with your boomer perspective.

[ridethebike]

As a person who grew up in farmer's family (and who's parents are still farmers) I can attest that that kind of life is way tougher than being office worker in a city .

[supernovae]

How so?

[watwut]

> the reality was that people completed the day's work in a few hours and didn't do much for the rest of the day.

That is not plausible. And that is not what you find where we have written texts about farmers lifestyles. And, if you look in very recent history about lifestyles in behind-the-times villages, you don't find that much slack either.

Also, pretty much all arguments about how little farmers worked I have seen ignored pretty much any work that did not involved food crops directly: making and fixing tools, beds, buildings. Making candles. Raising and spinning flax to make linen. Sewing cloth, bedsheets etc. Chopping wood. Caring about children and animals. All that had to be made at home or at least inside village. In an interview with old lady from such village, I heard her saying that making bedsheets and all that for bride took years. They started making it when girl got born.

> That 30-40 year lifespan is also a myth. High mortality brings down the average, but people's lifespan has been around 70 throughout history.

Yeah, mortality tends to bring down the lifespan average. I don't see how you can meaningfully measure lifespan while removing people who died from the pool. Women dying in childbirths, which was not exceptional at all, should lower the estimated lifespan. People dying from accidents that could be saved today too.

> As for whether people face more psychological pressure than previous generations, yeah there are plenty of people whose job it is to record and measure this stuff, and they all seem to say it has increased. This just may not fit with your boomer perspective.

These statistics don't really exists of old farmer communities. They did not had modern diagnostic criteria, all that was created much much later. We can guess from what people wrote in literature and chronicles.

As for psychological pressures, there was serfdom, slavery, impressment, wars. "Wars" meant armies stealing food from farmers, that is how armies fed themselves. There was poverty too. But of course, a lot depends on which period and which place and which social class you talk about. Nevertheless, generally, people in the past were in fact subjects to stress.

[zephyr9]

>> That 30-40 year lifespan is also a myth. High mortality brings down the average, but people's lifespan has been around 70 throughout history.

> Yeah, mortality tends to bring down the lifespan average. I don't see how you can meaningfully measure lifespan while removing people who died from the pool. Women dying in childbirths, which was not exceptional at all, should lower the estimated lifespan. People dying from accidents that could be saved today too.

Whoops, should be *child mortality. So yeah a lot of kids used to die, but we can't really blame them now can we. The way I've seen it measured is as life expectancy after a certain age, e.g. in preindustrial eras, once a person reached 30 they could expect to live to at least 60.

As for people measuring psychological stressors, yeah that's really only since the inception of the profession. Not too many 12th century psych majors...

[watwut]

> once a person reached 30 they could expect to live to at least 60

First not true. Looking at wikipedia, "If we do not take into account child mortality in total mortality, then the average life expectancy in the 12–19 centuries was approximately 55 years. If a medieval person was able to survive childhood, then they had about a 50% chance of living up to 50–55 years."

Also, 30 is quite a lot. It means, you survived childbirth if you are woman. First one is the most dangerous. It means, you did not got injured in accident with animal or tool in your teens and twenties - when you are at your physical prime and do heavy work the most.

> As for people measuring psychological stressors

I think that child mortality is yet another stressors they faced. But also, if your relative is bipolar or has schizophrenia and whole family lives in one room cabin, I can only imagine things to become super stressful for everyone.

[UncleOxidant]

> Capitalism has changed that a bit now though.

So Capitalism has only recently taken hold of the US?

> As for whether people face more psychological pressure than previous generations, yeah there are plenty of people whose job it is to record and measure this stuff, and they all seem to say it has increased.

Even worse than it was during The Great Depression leading into WWII? Even worse than it was if you were black in the Jim Crow south? Things aren't great now, but let's try to keep things in perspective.

[borroka]

It is a bit naive to think that life was harder (it is generally true of course) 100 years ago, and thus the most common emotional and physical conditions were fatigue, despair, and darkness.

The pressures of life 50-70-100 years ago were very different from what we experience in our time, just as the emotional and physical pressure and fatigue that come from doing manual labor (e.g., moving furniture) is different from the stress of a well-paid white-collar job. Naively, one might assume that manual, back-breaking work is significantly more stressful than a professional job. From a physical, chronic body strain perspective, this is true. Also, the white-collar professional, say a worker in tech, can make 2-3 times to 10 times (and more) than a non-specialized blue-collar worker. As we know, more money in hand never made a life worse.

But I've been around blue-collar and professional environments my whole life, and anecdotally, white-collar workers are much more stressed than blue-collar workers, more frequently in emotional distress, and almost always in-between distressing work issues. And envy and constant comparisons that seemed to be endemic in, say, the tech world, do more damage than one imagines. There may be a former colleague who now has the title of vice president, another who invested in crypto and earned a fortune, yet another who took home a few million dollars when the start-up company he worked for and on which nobody would have bet by hook or by crook was acquired, have ruined more than one existence.

I, a tech professional who is well paid and has no health problems, should be much happier on paper--and I might say more relaxed, satisfied, enthusiastic--than a worker moving cartons back and forth with a forklift and than I was when I had much less money, a less comfortable life, less leisure time and fewer professional and personal opportunities, and an economically uncertain future ahead.

Why am I not then? Is it because of "more money, more opportunities, more problems"? Is it because years ago I had the enthusiasm and arrogance of youth and now the more careful and cynical pace of those who know they have more to lose? Is it because I had that lightheartedness that perhaps those in less intellectually demanding jobs have had fewer opportunities to lose over time?

I lived all of my youth with my grandparents: born before World War II, modest families to be generous, all their lives working in the fields, driving trucks, assembling furniture. However, I saw very few emotional problems (overt, at least), perhaps because they were born and raised in an environment that didn't let them dream much and thus didn't favor disappointment later on. A wife or husband who "just needs to be a good person and work a steady job", a day at the beach that was an event they talked about for months if not years. There was little envy because in the end relatives and friends all lived the same life and the serious problems were those coming from poor health. Work ended at 5 or 6 in the afternoon, and you would arrive home tired, but you would think about work the next day. Dinner and lunch were homemade; during the weekend you did the housework and visited relatives or friends, and maybe you had ice cream here and there.

Would I trade my life for theirs? I wouldn't; I like to have opportunities and I have a lot more ambition than my grandparents. But, would they have traded theirs for mine? I asked my grandfather some time ago, "Would you like to take a plane once in your life ?'' He replied no. Maybe that's part of the secret.