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?
Uh, that seems like a legitimate reason to be stressed. You might just be particularly stress-tolerant.
Maybe they have a great support network via family. Maybe they don’t understand what life is like without a job and home.
Certainly possible. In that case I would have expected a good faith attempt to understand that those resources and conditions separate them from a large number of people having a more difficult time, but who knows.