Why are so many people struggling with life?

[Letsgetgoing888]

Not just due to covid, but it’s definitely been highlighted more recently....

But in recent years there seem so many more angry people, stressed people, depressed people, people that can’t control their temper, mental health issues, obese kids, obese adults, people who don’t look after themselves or their kids properly...

I know mental health services are woefully inadequate, but generally as a society we are talking more about mental health, provide benefits, charity support, free healthcare and so much more than in the past.

But more people seem to be really struggling in many different ways, health wise, financially, mentally, emotionally. Suicide rates are higher now than in the past (even pre-covid).

Did they have it right in the old days of stiff upper lip? And if not, why are things so much worse now when there is so much more awareness?

To add to some very interesting points, life expectancy and the pressure to self actualise also are a strong driver. No more are we satisfied with our lot even though life expectancy is much higher. If anything, living longer may be driving poor mental health. Ie we are x age and still have only y. Plus many of us seem to live under the dissolution we are quasi immortal.

To me our whole approach to life is playing havoc with our mental health. There was a thread a few months back, where the op started a thread arguing it was harder to lose parents when they were older than if they had been younger because the longer they lived, the more attached to them they became. The subtext for me was that it was harder for a person to lose a parent in their 40’s or 50’s than losing a parent as a child (as was my case). Baffling... and even more so that some posters were agreeing.

There is an order to life and the only sure thing in it is that we are all born and we all die. Teaching this as a fact to our children is an enormous gift. Whereas the consensus seems to now be that people as are hard done by if their parents don’t live til their 80’s, which indicates to me that people now expect to live at least that long without the understanding of what that actually means - physical / mental health, wealth levels and end of life care etc. However, in the past, people died younger and infant mortality was much higher. This was something we accepted as part of life... not that I am trying to say the pain parents felt from losing a child was somehow less. Then due to medical advances, we are able to detect pregnancy so early also means we are able to detect losing a pregnancy as early as 6 weeks. And we can abort unhealthy / deformed foetuses. Fantastic on some level but also bad for our mental health. Modern medicine is therefore a double edged sword.

Then because so many of us are alive due to modern medicine, we are all competing and vying for our own personal space. This is in short supply. The less space there is, the more we need to identify and to be “seen as”, the more we become herds or packs. And now there is no guidance from a higher being. Ie church / God. I am not religious myself, however, despite the church’s many faults, it gave society a moral compass and a sense of community, which is sorely lacking. Social media has become the new “community” and this is not a good thing because as we know, screens breed bravado and keyboard warriors, celebrities the new gods.

Today’s society, I think, is perhaps under the dissolution that we are somehow superior to the past. I would say this period in history will be studied in 100 years time and judged lacking in some areas and beneficial in others, just as all periods in the past... not that I would want to return to the dark ages.

I think it's a shame children don't get out on their own much anymore.

It's not that long ago (40 years?) that kids would go out and play with their friends in an adult free world of their own where they had their own rules and were independent. That was where you learnt to sink or swim with your friends.

Without that great reality check of being outside with other kids, I think kids grow up before their time now and are a weird mix of spoilt/mollicoddled and over exposed to adult problems with too much pressure from adults and peers.

Instead of children being carefree and allowed to be innocent and in their own world they are too exposed to porn, violence, woke thinking etc. Most people under rate balance.

I wouldn't expect it's actually worse or that people were largely all that different 50 years ago or 100 years ago etc - I think people are less bound by shame and societal norms have changed, so these issues can be talked about more openly now. People suffer in silence less and adopt a stiff upper lip less. We also have more measures, statistics and information sharing so the scale of prevalence of mental health issues, obesity etc can be ascertained.

I think of things like women not having contraception or the right to choice, and having to stiff upper lip the scenarios that resulted in - my gran talks about the past like a foreign world she wouldn't like to revisit. There is always a lot of reviewing the past with rose tinted glasses as though "those were the days" and things were better. Women went through so much institutionalised discrimination; but who wanted to hear about it? No one. Look what it took to change to be more tolerant. Apply that to race, sexuality etc. Now people can more openly talk about their experiences and feelings.

With greater freedoms come greater choices though; The expanded choices available in life nowadays can be confounding and a simple sense of purpose can be hard to establish. Technological change is faster than even and it's hard to understand what it is doing to us. Social media has only been around a short while but it feels like it's changing the world a lot for the worse. Although here we all are on a SM platform so really interesting thread though!

I'm no expert but I see a lot of people who seem to be spread really thin and hear constant talk of "juggling". Juggling work and life admin and housework and the kids. Juggling the holidays which seems to mean trying to use 2 x 28 days leave and whatever clubs and favours you can find to somehow cover 13 weeks of school holidays.

Long commutes which take up hours of your life and are made worse by levels of traffic or overcrowded and unreliable public transport. My grandad used to live near enough work come home to eat lunch, unimaginable today.

Both these things drain time and energy which leaves less for leisure and relationships. Without this a person may then have less support and even isolate themselves. This will just increase the stress and drain more from you.

@garlictwist

I think it's always been like this. It's just it's more talked about now.

It really hasn’t.

My nan became a single parent in the 50’s when her husband died. My mum had a tough childhood, she had to run the house when nan was at work when she was only about 8/9yo. My nan struggled with anxiety and depression most of her life after this and remarried eventually to an abusive man which didn’t help matters either financially or for the children.

So I don’t think it was necessarily easier or unheard of back then. As a single parent I have far more support options outside of the friend/family circle as I have tax credits to help financially and there are childcare options around school.

However the thing I find difficult, especially looking forward to when I won’t be getting tax credits is that one wage is insufficient for living costs and this worries me a lot for my future.

I'm of the belief that humans haven't evolved fast enough to cope with modern life. The pressures that we and society put on ourselves is immense.

Someone above mentioned the pressure to achieve self-actualisation and I totally agree. No longer is it enough to be safe and healthy.

@ClareBlue

A shift in values from placing value on integrity, honesty and selflessness and community to admiring ruthlessness, accumulation of material things, thinking it's clever to avoid paying your fair share of tax etc and generally thinking success is screwing over people and finding their weakness. It has all created a void in our connection as humans which is magnified through SM. It starts from the top. Leadership is important in setting the tone and currently the tone is wrong.

This, and what ComtesseDeSpair said.

Reading posts on here, you get a very clear view of just how normalised judgement by material possessions/home ownership/'nice' area etc has become and also how entitled people feel to getting on, and up, the 'property ladder', with very little awareness of the pernicious societal effects of that culture. The UK's whole societal model is predicated on doing 'better' than others (mainly materially, but in other ways too - see the idea that in schools, all children need to be achieving above average for a school to be considered good - the ridiculousness of that idea is obvious when it's put in those terms, but the notion of its desirability has come from the general culture).

I'm not convinced that more people are struggling now than they were at any other time over the whole of history. I think that it is more visible now because people feel unburdened from pretending that life is fine for them and secondly because internet technologies allow you access to the thoughts and feeling of everyday people who otherwise wouldn't be able to publish the reality of their day to day lives.

I think you can lay the decline of well-being over the last ten years squarely at the feet of austerity.

I would imagine that in the past pre penicillin/NHS, when people died regularly of disease, just being alive and fit was considered fortunate and a belief in God would mean that this was the life God chose for you rather than constant envy of those better off. When I was young in the 1950/60s people still went to church so there was a feeling that you and your community had the same basic beliefs of what was right and wrong. Now we realise that those in prison have had difficult childhoods, other religions have to be respected, its acceptable to be angry about stuff (considered rude in the past). It's more complicated now.

@sparklepink

i think people are more disconnected to real relationships, friendships and suchlike. There is more pressure on people to achieve or own or have. Probably related to increased technology, social media and the like. Blurred lines between real life and work and screentime. Less time in nature. Bad habits endemic in society. And governmental and social policy widening the gap between the haves and the have nots. People turn to things that numb the emotional pain e.g. social media, technology, bad food etc. Plus the issue of the polarisation of society from youtube algorithms, facebook feeds pushing you further to either side of the fence.

“My grandparents grew up in absolute poverty and would be amazed at the standard of living most of us have now. They would be even more amazed at our expectation to be happy all the time and how little we work to achieve our aims.

A shift in values from placing value on integrity, honesty and selflessness and community to admiring ruthlessness, accumulation of material things, thinking it's clever to avoid paying your fair share of tax etc and generally thinking success is screwing over people and finding their weakness. It has all created a void in our connection as humans which is magnified through SM.
I also think some children are too busy these days, they don't get the time to just relax and be a child any more.”
So many good points on here ^^

Adults seem to act like spoilt brats these days. It’s all about me, me, me! How are you ever going to be happy if you constantly compare yourself to others, in every single respect. You can’t.

I am, btw, very wary of nostalgia for the presumed 'simpler' life 'back then'. 'The past', in large part, was a nasty violent place where ill-treatment of those of 'weaker' or 'lower' status was pretty much institutionalised. I can't get all that fussed if the pendulum has swung a bit too far the other way and a few people whose lives haven't been that challenging write social media screeds about their 'journeys'. I'm just grateful - particularly to those who spoke up against great societal resistance and made the changes happen - that women now have a choice to leave abusive relationships, evil men and dreadful parents no longer have carte blanche to systematically destroy children's lives and we no longer inflict physical violence or death in the name of justice.

@FunkBus excellent post, totally agree.

I think we need to fundamentally change how we live. If so many people are struggling, that points to problems with society as a whole and how things are run and not individual ability to cope imo.

Because the cost of living has rocketed and the minimum wage hasn’t kept up. Because of the rise in exploitative zero-hour contracts. Because of failures in the roll out of universal credit. Because of the growing gap between rich and poor. Because of the cost of housing. Because of lack of investment in the NHS. Because of years and years of austerity, and the enduring loss of public services as a result. Because of poor work life balance and long commutes. Because of social isolation. Because of the relentless vision of unattainable happiness sold by advertisers. Because of smartphone addiction. Because of time poverty. Because of a failing education system.

I don’t know statistics to know if there are more suicides/higher incidence of mental illness. In terms of severe mental illness I think service has always been very poor. It is now more visible to public. Mental hospitals which were sometimes very good, but often brutal meant that people with mental illness were hidden. Care in the community was never funded properly. It has also become acceptable to talk about illness.

Outside that SM and the sheer amount of news. At one point you knew about a disaster in your area, then it became your country, then mate you heard about things abroad if a relative or friend was affected. Now unless you self regulate it can seem like there is always disaster and pain. (Not saying more news all bad. We did not see how our lifestyle impacted on other countries/wealth disparity/wars wealthier countries fuelled by arms sales).

Social media has it's downsides but like many things there are also positives.
When I was a single mum with a tiny baby mumanet was a life saver. I got a lot of support. Obviously i got flamed now and again and flounced once but i rekon I have spent about 5 years of my life on aibu!!

Dd has social media and in lockdown it was a life saver as she used it to do free calls with all her mates. Obviously this also has a downside as there can be drama but school are very hot on internet safety and the kids are very open if things blow uo and then us adults intervene.
When not in lockdown dd is always out with her mates but then we live in a small country town so very safe...i might fe differently in the big smoke.
For me the biggest worry is climate change...we are all destroying our planet which causes some anxiety.
I was very messed up as a young adult 25 years ago and was hospiraliaed for mh but it has built resiliance and while this current crisis is horrid for so many my bad scoeriences in the past have given me the stregth to see the best in it.
Humans have always had tough lives....life is a strughle...we just need an arsenal of tools to deal with it...not always taught...often learned.
Buddhism is a great religion in that it teaches us to face life's inevitable suffering and therefore refuce it. Not preaching as im not buddhist but i admire it. Makes sense to me.

Maybe not mate

Sorry for typos

The Internet. We can instantly see what others have and want it too. Reality TV also means largely talentless people become rich and famous for doing nothing, so we think why can’t we have their lifestyle when we work so much harder?

However, there are also people nowadays who don’t expect to have to work so hard, yet still feel entitled to things. A lot of young people just don’t want to put in the effort. Not generalising, just going by people I work with and some I see online.

Whatever...just my take on it ...dosn't mean its true.....hust helps me whereas you might have other ways of coping with life.

Just*

For all of you citing the internet...you are actually on it now you know! I love it myself! There is no getting rid of it now!

There is so much research on this being published at the moment. My understanding is that our lives and our environments have become unnatural/inhumane. They encourage us to be sedentary, have easy access to high energy, non-plant foods, sleep less, live alone or in small numbers, constantly exposed to threats we cannot fight or fly from.

We also crucially misunderstand the nature of happiness and how to achieve it.