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?

I was born in 1961 when the welfare state was at it's most benevolent. We all knew that our lives would be much more comfortable than our parents and grandparents (I don't think my dad ever went on a plane). education was free, employment and housing were secure and the pension could be relied on.

Life is much less secure now. Everyone is expected to go to university, which costs a fortune, employment is unreliable and irregular, housing is increasingly expensive. Dear Maggie sold off all the social housing stock without replacing at and pensions are fast disappearing into the distance.

No wonder people are so stressed...even before the pandemic.

Divide and rule is always a facet of Tory governments.

Agreed. This mornings public sector freeze will be yet another example - why should people who worked through the pandemic have a decent standard of pay when those in the private sector are losing jobs - because of them. They will wheel out the public vs private sector argument and hope they can use it as an excuse to remove even more benefits from public sector workers. Not going to work for me. We all need decent pay for this country prosper and this idea that someone needs to suffer so someone else can benefit is bullshit when it is quite clear it doesn't apply to top earners. So much money has been wasted in this pandemic by dodgy contracts that have not delivered (and we're probably never meant to). It does feel like this is a case of strategic incompetence with this government, they aren't even bothered about appearing as incompetent and lacking in compassion, which is worrying really.

Anyway, I don't want to drag a good thread into a political argument. There are some really good points on this thread and it is nice to know I'm not alone and we all are seeing the same things.

@majesticallyawkward

I read something interesting the other day about how the shift in how children were/are treat has caused some massive issues. It looked at millennials who were given trophies for everything and praised and rewarded for everything, with the message of 'every one did a great job' even when they hadn't. The children saw that everyone got the trophy and the praise even when they hadn't done anything or had performed badly, that lead to a generation of people who simply don't have faith in their abilities or believe when they are given positive feedback- they have constant self doubt and second guess everything.

It's not a healthy state of mind to be second guessing every single interaction or move you make, and here we are with anxiety and MH disorders common in so many.

We also have a falling standard of living, a climate crisis, housing shortage and, well look around us the world isn't in a good place, but we are constantly hearing how lazy and entitled the millennials are when actually a lot of the problems were caused by previous generations who now deride and ridicule us while refusing to acknowledge or do anything to correct the damage they did.

I don’t think millennials are who most people think they are. Millennials are now aged 25-40. They are the generation who hit adulthood when we began recession after recession, who were told “everyone should go to university” and unsurprisingly got caught out when suddenly everyone has a degree. A degree which they had to pay for through deductions from their minimum wage pay. They’re the first generation to really be caught up in the spiralling house prices where you need to be in a working couple to afford to buy.

We are saddled with debt, unable to accumulate wealth, stuck in low-benefit, dead-end jobs, we will never gain the financial security that our parents, grandparents, or even older siblings enjoyed (a security which is still expected).

We are the first generation to be almost guaranteed to die poorer than our parents, and it sucks.

I think it’s a combination of things.

1. Our expectations are so very high now especially when young. We are told we can do anything, be anything with little acknowledgment given to the huge structural inequalities of wealth and opportunity in the UK. When people’s experience fails to live up to their expectations then self loathing and anxiety can set in and I think this is quite common in the your teens and 20s these days.

1. Tech and Social media do a few things that I think are very damaging they increase our exposure to harmful messaging and advertising. Instagram, YouTube and most social media platforms are highly commodified spaces where reality is literally warped in order to sell an item or a person. Seeing alleged perfect bodies and faces or what seems like unfettered access to wealth can be damaging to self esteem.

Tech and social media often takes the place of face to face connection and relationships. It’s not all bad and can be helpful and supportive but it does both eat into our time and perhaps satisfy our need for contact just enough that it deters us from spending time and energy on real people, face to face. Not to mention the commodification of relationships romantic or otherwise due to dating apps and social media.

Social media isn’t good for our social skills, it encourages poor behaviour such as ghosting and erodes our listening skills. Ultimately it gives the illusion of connection without actually being deeply satisfying to our brains and nervous system setting us up for feelings of loneliness an poor mental health.

Then there is the lack of escape, years ago if you were bullied at school or work you could (in most cases) go home to the safety of your home and family, close the door and have some escape from the situation. Now it follows you, it’s in your pocket, on your phone, in your private, safe space. I think this is especially true for very young people and I worry that this sort of anxiety at a young age sets them up for issues throughout life?

Even on here it’s not unusual for things to turn quite negative on threads and taking part in or reading those threads isn’t especially good for us when we could be relaxing, doing a hobby or connecting with a loved one. How much time of our lives to we waste on our phone, on here speaking into the void hoping someone will hear us when we could be talking and listening face to face with someone.

Obviously there are other issues like our atomisation, our disconnection from neighbours, the breakneck speed of change to our way of living over the past few decades that our brains have not yet caught up to.

We seek more and more to connect with people like us and that is possible online and it can feel good but can lead to an echo chamber and the sort of polarisation that is currently tearing us apart.

I am hesitant to say that the current attitude to mental health is problematic, I’m not a mental health professional and I feel on the whole that it’s been a positive thing. Everyone is physically unwell at times and everyone can feel anxious, sad or depressed at times. Just as sometimes people develop serious illnesses like diabetes sometimes people become seriously unwell. I do have some doubts about the over medicalisation of people and especially children. Medication is of course needed but we can be quick to medicate looking for an easy fix when in reality a person might needs to be properly cared for and that our society might need fixing!

I was born in 1961 when the welfare state was at it's most benevolent. We all knew that our lives would be much more comfortable than our parents and grandparents (I don't think my dad ever went on a plane). education was free, employment and housing were secure and the pension could be relied on.

Life is much less secure now. Everyone is expected to go to university, which costs a fortune, employment is unreliable and irregular, housing is increasingly expensive. Dear Maggie sold off all the social housing stock without replacing at and pensions are fast disappearing into the distance.

Very much this. Belong to the same generation and though I grew up abroad dh grew up in this country. Both not under a similar welfare state but also with the basic belief- shared by almost everybody around us- that life would simply go on getting better and better, that if there were still some wrinkles left they would shortly be ironed out and everybody's lives would be happier and healthier and more comfortable.

How many young people believe that now?

A part of this is people having expectations of being happy ALL THE TIME !!!
and having huge expectations, many young people don't want to work their way up any more, they have expectations of coming out of Uni and having a well paid, career path laid out with help and support on tap. My Dh sees this all the time in his organisation.

If we compare the average expectation of what people expected to have in the 50's or 70's compared to today..the gap is vast.

For my generation we expected to work long hours/weekends/in often rubbish jobs to achieve anything, not have new 'things' from washing machines to clothes. It was the norm to slog for years to buy a modest home or just rent one, and almost impossible unless married or with additional help.
Then to live on a shoestring for many more years.

I was luckier than many as I created a good income from a small business,in my 20's even then l expected to work 70 + odd hours a week, not take holidays and had a £500 car for 8 years.

If one struggled there was more of a, have a good cry and then get on with it attitude....

I also think children in decades past were not brought up to be the most important thing......they are often now little princes and princesses who are always put first, allowed to be selfish and not see the struggles of those around them, parents, grandparents etc.

We have become more selfish and individualistic as a society, and there is less community.

It has been clearly illustrated during Covid, some are more concerned about not being able to go to the gym, pub, shops than about rising number of people getting ill and hospitalisation rates rising.

Our surroundings have evolved way too quickly for us to keep up.

We are more indulgent and self-indulgent than previous generations. Social media has stoked the fires (and made it all too easy) of wanting to have a voice and be validated. Where people used to just get on with it, these days one must first create a post about it.

So many interesting points in the earlier posts. I thought it would be a whingey thread but it’s turned out to be a very nice discussion.

DrCoconut might I suggest that the main difference here might be that you now live in a more affluent part of the country than your grandmother did?

Believe me, there are still kids going hungry. Speak to someone who works for a foodbank.

As for the housing situation, I don't actually personally know anyone who owns a 5 bedroom house so that can't be everybody's expectation: this must be you moving in select circles.

For ordinary low-income young people, your alternative doer-upper is going to be way beyond their means: the gap between rises in house prices and rises in salary is just too high. Banks wouldn't give my dd a mortgage however much she turned up in her grandmother's cast-offs and swore she had never tasted an avocado.

Social media gives unrealistic expectations to people .
No one has free will and cant speak freely about things any more in case you upset some one.
Too many people getting offended and complaining about stuff.
I hate this country now and there’s no wonder people have mental health problems .

I think tech is responsible for a massive amount of issues.
I've noticed DH seems to have the attention span of a goldfish and anything 'slow' he loses interest in really soon because it's not the speed of information coming into his brain that the computer provides.
If I am telling him about my day, even if it provides information he needs to know about or would interest him, he starts to yawn and wants me to get to the point really fast.
I now stop speaking and turn my back on him until he can change his mindset to 'reality' and not 'cyber'.

We used to chat all day and do stuff together. He is on the computer a lot now and our lives are unrecognisable and monochrome.

Social media - private life used to be mostly private, now it's a competition for who is having the most fabulous life, which makes most people feel like shit, but they either can't or won't opt out, because in many cases it's the only way to keep in touch.

Work/life balance - if you have any kind of professional job then isn't one any more thanks to laptops, mobile phones and the expectation that you will be always on, always checking in, even in the evening, even when you're supposed to be on holiday. You have to be available from at least 7am-9pm every day. This eats into your private time, family time, chill out and exercise time and it's SO corrosive to mental health over time.

What all of that adds up to is relentless pressure - and that's why there are so many people with MH problems. Life used to be so simple, no one could see your or check up on you constantly, now you have to always be accountable - it's stifling.

I think a lot of people feel utterly cheated. The generation that has student loan debt, can't afford a house because house prices have rocketed in comparison to wages, can't access council housing because that has been gutted and reframed as something only people in the direst of need should have, are paying larger pension contributions for longer so that they can retire later on a smaller pension than the generation before them, are aware that provision for health and social care for their generation is totally lacking, are watching the climate change warnings they've heard their whole life come true and still no one is acting, are told they are entitled and lazy and any financial need they have is because they waste all their income on coffees and avocados, are experiencing increasing inequality between the haves and have nots... bit tricky to be cheerful and upbeat in the face of all that, really.

I’m pretty sure people were miserable in days of yore.
Can’t imagine being married off at 13 was fun.
Or having six dead infants.
Or having daily excruciating toothache until they fell out or someone pulled them.

I agree that our society has particular issues, but I think there was an insane amount of undiagnosed MH issues in the past too. People just didn't have the knowledge or the tools to deal with it, so it was repressed instead. I was raised by my grandparents and my poor grandmother (now 91) has obviously suffered with depression and social anxiety her whole adult life, but she and we just lived with it, without any real awareness of why she was the way she was. It was also a source of shame and something to hide away, so when one of DH's grandmothers had a break down in her teens due to 'nerves' she was promptly institutionalized for several years and then it was NEVER talked about. I've had similar struggles to my grandmother, but I know about it, talk about it when appropriate, have resorted to counselling etc etc. And our whole family now openly acknowledges her issues, because we now have a 'language' to use to do so, which we just didn't as a bog standard Irish working class family back in the 70s and 80s, when the nearest anyone got was admitting that she was "odd".

I'm Irish and maybe this is Ireland-specific, BUT one big difference I do notice between my grandparents' generation of Irish people (born in the 1930s to dirt poor families in the arse end of rural Ireland) and mine, is that their generation didn't expect to be in control of their lives in the same way? I'm trying to think of a way to explain here. I think they were more accepting of the idea that chance and luck actually play a big part in life, so they didn't view every set back as a failure which could've been avoided if only they'd done X or Y or Z better. In other words "shit happens". Whereas I find contemporary middle class English culture, particularly parenting culture, can be exhaustingly intense and risk averse and perfectionist....and I think that's driven by the belief that you CAN achieve perfection if you just do all The Right Things, and if you don't achieve that perfection its because YOU have failed in that way.

I’m never quite sure what period people mean, that was happier.

I grew up in the 70s.
My dad was bullied at work to the point of a nervous breakdown from which he never really recovered.
My mum was trapped at home with kids too late to realise she wasn’t in the least maternal, in our later years working rubbish hours in low wages jobs because dad was off - whereas if they’d had a 2020 relationship he’d have been a happy (and good) SAHD and she’d have earned far more than he ever did, and felt fulfilled.
They don’t like each other, but divorce wasn’t financially or socially an option.
One of their sons killer himself in 1982 after a long period of depression.
Another son hasn’t worked in years due to severe social anxiety.
Mum is now old and claustrophobic.
Both rattle when they walk for various MH related medications.
Neither have ever owned a smartphone.

My family, one anecdote, I know - not an entire generation. I’m happier now as an adult than I was as a child, and I’m pretty certain that my teens are happier than I was.

What I see is an interesting discrepancy between the average age of the people on MN treating minor Covid-related inconveniences as the end of the world and the supposed rugged resilience of anyone who was brought up in the 60s and 70s. "Our generation learnt to be resilient"- as far as I can see, our ruggedly resilient generation is doing a pretty good job of moaning about pretty well everything.

On the other hand, I have been impressed by the courage and dignity of so many of my students, isolated in student rooms waiting for their test results or struggling with illness, and still almost unfailingly polite and positive and in many cases hard-working.

Yes, there is a lot of selfishness in our current public discourse, a lot of me-me-me and a quite shocking lack of concern for the plight of others. But how much of that is driven by 20yos? Let's be honest with ourselves: an awful lot of that entitlement is coming from the middle-aged.

Humans have evolved by learning through failure to be resilient, the survival of the fittest. The expectation of "happiness" is unrealistic and misguided.

Being content for periods of your life in between periods of striving is probably the life that brings most satisfaction.
People like the Kardashians probably do quite a lot of harm to mental health.

I think some of it comes down to comparison (via social media) being the thief of joy.

I was thinking the other day how bizarre it is that nowadays you could easily walk into someone's house, make yourself a cup of tea because you know what is kept in which kitchen cupboard, point out which child's bedroom belongs to which child, and pick out their latest cleaning product purchase in the cupboard under the stairs. Whereas a few years back, you'd most likely have no idea what the inside of your cousin's or colleague's house looked like.

People overshare so much virtually, it's not only pretty unsafe (in my view - you never know who is watching!) l but this must have an impact on people's happiness if they are constantly keeping up with the Joneses? Added with materialism it's a recipe for disaster.

Another thing I thought of that I've been thinking about a lot - we are all asked to care and be terribly concerned about so many issues these days. I had a (white) friend on fb posting that 'silence is violence' and that if you don't post about black lives matters on your social media, you're part of the problem. We don't even live in a country that has more than a handful of black people, so while I do find it, of course, very sad that black people are targeted by the police in the US, I honestly don't see what me posting on social media is going to do to change that. (As far as I know, the original point of 'silence is violence' was meant to be that if you see racism in your everyday life, you should speak up, which I can definitely get behind.)

Likewise, I saw an article in the Guardian about how aboriginal children are disproportionately separated from their families in Australia - of course, again, very sad, but there's really not much I can do about it. So I read the article, I get depressed about the horrible situation and then? What? Nothing.

I do think that when we have all of these awful issues shoved in our faces day in day out - all the illnesses and poverty and natural disasters and discrimination against different groups, it's really hard to keep caring about every single thing. A lot of these issues are extremely complicated, for example, poverty in Africa. In the 70s/80s/90s, it was just, well, watch Comic Relief and do a sponsored walk and you'd done your bit. Now, we realise that those issues aren't really solved by doing that, and I think it makes us feel a bit powerless and crap.

Plus, honestly, I feel like at our core, a lot of us just don't really care that much. How can we? How can we truly care about every single issue - about black people in the US and Uighurs and Syria and children sold into sexual slavery in the Philippines and orangutans losing their homes and floods in Vietnam and children without food in the UK and on and on? We literally cannot care about all of those things in any kind of meaningful way and yet if you say that, you are deemed a truly awful person. So we have to say 'oh yes, it's really awful, so terrible and sad' or donate money to gofundmes or do a social media post or fundraise or whatever but since we don't actually care, it creates a disconnect where we wonder if we are really horrible since everyone else seems to care so much.

Short answer: Capitalism

What is this magical period when people did not find life difficult? Surely the theme of "life is a valley of tears" runs through recorded history?

I think the point is more that people didn't complain endlessly about it?
People on the whole used to expect life to be hard, it wasn't a surprise. Now, people seem to expect life to be easy, and fail to appreciate how much easier it already is.

@SomewhereEast I completely agree with you about a language for MH issues.

For those who watched early Eastenders, you may remember Arthur Fowler’s 1986 mental breakdown. I was a child, and it was the first time I saw something like that - and I just saw my dad. It was the first time that I knew we weren’t the only household with a man not washing, or crying, or just staring, or going mad and flipping tables.

If I fast forward to 2020 - if a soap showed a character looking a little down, or not bothered about life, or unwashed... immediately my pre-teen would say, “oh mum - this is going to be an MH story line.”