[southernplaces7]

>Although I wonder if loneliness, stress and lack of direction are much bigger problems today.

I'm pretty sure that abysmal health options, food insecurity to the point of famine always being just a stone's throw or single bad season away, and grinding poverty all created plenty of stress. The vast majority of people at the time just had no IG Reels with which to vent about their crisis mode for posterity. I just can't imagine any random modern person's level of stress being somehow worse.

As for lack of direction. Life in those times for a vast majority had a simple direction: labor and toil intensely until you die of old age/disease in the same place you were born, rarely straying more than a few miles from those horizons. I'd call today's self-created "lack of direction" pretty preferable to that.

[hattmall]

I've read stress is probably much worse today because of the speed at which we experience stressful events. Sure famine and illness were a concern, and we still have to stress and concern ourselves about resource accumulation and illness today. But we also have a great deal of additional stress that didn't really exist at that time and much of it is stress that we have to simply put away to deal with other things so that we don't fall victim to MORE stressful situations. Just the fact that everytime you pass a car in opposing traffic you are about 5 feet away from having a total stranger kill you is a wildly stressful event that we mostly just abstract away and internalize in order to get where we are going at around 100ft per second. We also have the mental overhead of knowing that any sort of stressful event that happens we will become immediately aware of it.

It used to be a thing that people would have nervous breakdowns (panic attack) before checking the mail if they were worried about some impending news. Such as a son at war or a sick relative etc. Now we are simply in that state at pretty much any given time.