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 often wonder this. I am in my 60s and when I was growing up I never heard of anyone committing suicide. Now it seems everyday there is an item about a child/teen killing themselves, and (apparently) over something trivial (one that sticks in my mind was a teenager who killed herself because the hairdresser dyed her hair the wrong shade. This was OBVIOUSLY the final straw for her but even so...) I doubt if you could find any teenager who doesn't know someone who has killed themselves. It is terrifying that the youth of today haven't got any resilience to things that are 'normal life'. (I'm not talking Covid here) We were bullied at school - mental and physical - but we did, literally, 'get over it'. It was awful but no one ever committed suicide because of it. One of my best friends was really really badly bullied but we helped her through it. What was so different? (I get SM doesn't help, but bullying is bullying - and there were no 'anti-bullying' policies in schools. Teachers didn't give a stuff)

@corythatwas As a 'forrin' I think the baby boomers are easily the most entitled, least resilient generation in this country. I really noticed when working in 'public-facing' jobs that they were consistently the ones losing their shit about anything which inconvenienced them in even the most trivial way, whereas Brits under forty are pretty uniformly easy-going and adaptable. Likewise the generation now in their late eighties and nineties are mostly lovely (I've had some volunteer roles which have brought me into contact with that age group a lot over the years). Very anecdotal I know, but I've really never seen the older = "more resilient" thing play out. Oddly in contrast the Irish baby boomer generation are very undemanding, possibly because they weren't their country's Golden Generation in the same way?

Because society has broken down.

And the cost of living is disproportionately expensive compared to wages. There’s no such thing as a job for life any more. As a country we don’t really make or build anything, so a lot of our industries are bubbles which boom and then burst, meaning job security is perilous.

It’s impossible now for an average family to not just survive, but thrive, on one person’s salary. Working families are exhausted. Childcare is prohibitively expensive and prevents a lot of women from working or achieving their full potential.

People are isolated, scared, bored, and poor.

"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."

Totally agree with this. There is a bit in the book 'The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read' by Philippa Perry where she talks about how children aren't a machine where if you put xyz in, then an Oxbridge-ready adult comes out.

There is a lot of expectation on women and children these days, particularly in middle class culture.

[quote Cocomarine]@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.”[/quote]
Yes to this. There was just no language for it and you somehow knew not to talk about it outside the family, even without being told? I just knew it would somehow have been shameful and disloyal. Literally the only word we had for my grandmother's anxiety and paranoia and depression was that she was "odd", which sounds awful in hindsight.

"I am in my 60s and when I was growing up I never heard of anyone committing suicide."

People lied about it because it had a huge stigma attached to it. I know so many farmers whose gun 'accidentally went off' or mums who 'accidentally left the gas oven on' or dads who 'accidentally took too many pills'. A cousin of my dad's very obviously committed suicide, but when my dad went to talk about it once, my mum immediately told him to be quiet. It was taboo.

Plus we didn't have access to the same range of news. You knew about the lives of the people in your social circle and that's it. Now we read on facebook about our mum's cousins neighbour's boy's best friend's uncle who moved to New Zealand 50 years ago killing themselves and because there is that weak connection, we feel like we 'know' them. Before social media, we just didn't know the ins and outs of that many lives.

And the cost of living is disproportionately expensive compared to wages. There’s no such thing as a job for life any more

Compared to when? Back in the days when most of your pay packet went on the rent of a shithole and ALL of the rest went to try and feed your family? When jobs were scarce and you lined up on the docks waiting to see if you could get a days work? When there was no NHS and if you couldn't afford the dr or the medication you literally just died?

This is half the problem, comparing today to some non-existent halcyon days when everything was great. Apart from maybe a few years in the 1950's, and then only for some people, these glory days never existed.

@SomewhereEast

Ireland basically didn’t have baby boomers. That generation grew up in a different situation in remand compared to the UK and USA.

Compared to when? Back in the days when most of your pay packet went on the rent of a shithole and ALL of the rest went to try and feed your family? When jobs were scarce and you lined up on the docks waiting to see if you could get a days work? When there was no NHS and if you couldn't afford the dr or the medication you literally just died?

You'd have to be quite old to have any clear memories of a time before the NHS though. It's a fair bet that the vast majority of the posters on this thread going on about how "in my day we were resilient" are actually the products of the post-war NHS-supplied welfare state where a steadily improving lifestyle was a concept deeply ingrained in the national mentality.

I think generally there’s more societal pressure. We’re surrounded by the media selling the perfect lifestyle and I know amongst my friends some of us have put ourselves in debt trying to have the right car, right house, date nights, clothes etc, because there’s this sort of subconscious desire to kind of be showing a level of happiness/contentment.

Pressure to get good housing, pressure to perform at work, lifestyle expectations, body image expectations, pressure to have a clean house and lots of consumer goods, pressure to give our children the very best in everything.

I'm in my 60's and was brought up in a not very affluent fairly rural county. It seemed that everyone had a decent sized house, council housing with big garden readily available, more artisan and trade jobs, more farm and nursery jobs. People seemed to have more time to talk and everyone was laid back and friendly. Children were just left to their own devices, out all day playing in the fields and woods, as long as you came home for tea that was fine. Some of my friend's mothers worked, some didn't but it did not seem to be necessary financially. I would now view most of my friends and relations houses as being rather grubby and threadbare but no one seemed to be bothered about that sort of thing then.
Village schools with tiny classes were the norm. I might be an older person with a rosy view of the 50's and 60's but I do notice these things have changed. yes, there were a lot of things wrong with the world then but i think people were a lot happier.

You'd have to be quite old to have any clear memories of a time before the NHS though

Most people on here have no memories earlier than the 80's, and some were'nt even born then. We're not talking about out own memories, bur societal change.

where a steadily improving lifestyle was a concept deeply ingrained in the national mentality

And most lifestyles have in fact steadily improved since 1948, in many metrics. Even the poor have lifetsyles today their contempories of any other era could only dream of, in some senses. But this magical time where everyone had a job for life and lots of disposable cash....it never happened. The strikes of the 1970's, the electricity brown outs, the recessions, the crashes, etc etc etc. Some people did well, some people didn't. Excatly the same as now

I’m in my 40s and have had physical health issues all my life which have left me in chronic pain from childhood onwards. My mother always told me not to complain or talk to others about illness because in her words “nobody wants to hear about it” I think she was probably right, nobody does want to know. Has this made me more mentally resilient, which I think I am despite living with chronic pain. I’m not sure I credit that more to my father who tends to live in the moment and not dwell on things, I think has been a more beneficial model than just grimly bearing things!

I do think that in the past life was objectively harder and we didn’t have much choice as our lives were largely dictated by the social class we were born into but I think we had better connections and more support back then.

I also think that in the post war era things opened up tremendously for working class children and it became possible to rise up through education and hard work, there was room at the top so to speak. I think that has changed now and we see a lot more gatekeeping of careers and opportunities by those is a position to boost the chances of their children through internships, private schooling, tutoring and so on as well as help with buying a home and preventing debt accumulation. In someways we still imagine we live in that post war era when it was more possible to succeed and in reality the gate has narrowed a lot.

It’s very difficult to see beyond your own experience, so even if you receive lots of support and assistance in getting started in life you typically think of it as being down to your own hard work, while a person who doesn’t have the same family wealth or connections can be just as smart, work just as hard or harder and not have the same success.

There are always initiatives and trends to help the less fortunate, we are currently seeing this happen in the wake of BLM. However it’s always just tokenism and eventually it creeps back to how it has always been, and the outpouring of solidarity is revealed to be mere self promotion.

I think it can also set minority and disenfranchised groups against each other who should be allies. It is political, it is to do with neoliberalism and austerity, inequality and the tories and I think everyone who is affected by the structural inequalities in this country need to fight on a united front to change things, anything less is just picking through another persons shit for peanuts.

If I had to select one thing that contributes to this perceived feeling that people are struggling I would have to choose social media. On a time line of the last, say, thirty years, the rise of 'struggling' and the availability of social media almost perfectly match. One only has to look on this site about things which 'devastate' some people, not major life changing things, but trivial things, a sad picture on the paper, an unkind word from someone, the ability of vent seems to have added to people's 'anxiety', a word that gets trotted out when in fact someone is merely a bit pissed off.
How often do we read of a child's unhappiness being linked to social media? Children have always been unkind to others, as I know well from my own adolescence, but now it's magnified by social media.

This is half the problem, comparing today to some non-existent halcyon days when everything was great. Apart from maybe a few years in the 1950's, and then only for some people, these glory days never existed.

The 1950s is not a good example - they were really hard for most people. Maybe it was better in other places - the USA for example, which was much less impacted by lingering effects from the war - but here in the UK the 1950s were a time of real austerity and graft.

But you're right about about people looking back on times past as 'halcyon days' - they weren't - they just had different issues than we have now.

Some great comments and I agree with lots of you on the points raised.

I was motivated to write this post after hearing about and watching the footage of the co-op staff and the abuse they receive regularly at work, sometimes just by asking people to distance etc. There was one clip where a woman lost the plot completely and pulled down a whole shelf of wine. This quite shocked me....

I know that there has always been violent people, but it just feels worse now, that people have a shorter fuse. But I don’t know if that’s just increased awareness and reporting of these events.

I speak to large numbers of the public as part of my job, and am regularly shocked by some of the things they confide in me to do with their lifestyle, domestic violence, deep unhappiness, self harm, depression etc, and some who haven’t left the house since March. There is a large amount of people out there struggling.

I suppose in my opinion (I may be wrong) but I feel that in lots of ways we have it much easier nowadays, but it feels like the suicide rate (and self-harm) has sky rocketed which is what I used to base my original post on regarding things being worse. If we have more understanding and awareness and are more able to talk about our feelings, why is that so high? And if they were equally depressed in the past, why was the rate lower then? Maybe it is due to resilience?

I feel that it’s such an important thing to understand, and I do worry about my 3 dc’s.

Most people on here have no memories earlier than the 80's, and some were'nt even born then. We're not talking about out own memories, bur societal change.

I was specifically talking about posters who compare the entitled and sensitive young people of today to our own resilient generation. There are plenty of them on this thread.

@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?

'generally as a society we are talking more about mental health'

You've hit the nail on the head right there. We're talking about it more, so we know that people are suffering, when in the past we'd have been unaware, and also uncomfortable talking about any of our own issues.

The obesity thing has a lot to do with lifestyle. Most people spend every evening at home watching Netflix, kids look at screens instead of going out on their bikes, funding at schools is a problem so there may be less sport and PE than there used to be. Kids are being driven to school - in my day, the vast majority walked, or at the very least walked to get a bus if they lived too far away.

I think the financial worries are also a lot to do with expectations rising faster than earnings. If you look at lots of people who are struggling, they'll have mortgages, things on finance, credit cards - because as a society we just can't save up and wait. The kids have to be absolutely spoiled at Christmas, they have to have consoles and phones and we must have phone contracts and TV subscriptions. If people were happier with the simple things in life and didn't feel the need to keep up with the Joneses (who are probably up to their eyes in debt too, by the way) financial stress would be much lower. Of course that doesn't cover all families, but it does cover a lot of what keeps people up at night.

@FunkBus “ Totally agree with this. There is a bit in the book 'The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read' by Philippa Perry where she talks about how children aren't a machine where if you put xyz in, then an Oxbridge-ready adult comes out.

There is a lot of expectation on women and children these days, particularly in middle class culture.”

I agree with this but I don’t think it’s limited to middle class parents. I’m from a working class background and while my own parents in the eighties didn’t push us too hard and expected us to have lives much the same as them I think many working class parents have an idea of how competitive it is in the world, how difficult it is to find secure employment or buy a home but often we lack the resources to help our kids secure entry into the right universities and then we come on her and read that the university our child goes to isn’t respected because it isn’t a russelll group uni. We try to help them out but we don’t have £25,000 to help them get a foot on the housing market or connections that we can utilise to help them get a job or internship. So we lose hope and kick ourselves for raising their expectations because it’s so hard to compete with people who have so much more than you.

My Great Great Grandmother committed suicide. In 1904. It was all over the papers. Admittedly it was because she jumped into a river with all 3 of her sons, who all survived, the youngest (my Great Grandfather) barely as she was holding him down with her, according to witnesses. The article also stated that she had previously tried to slit her own throat after the death of her first husband and child. She was the widow of a prominent police man (second husband with who she had the 3 sons) who was murdered whilst doing his job, so that's probably why it hit the papers.

It was a fucking harrowing read, she had begged her sister to take her sons but she couldn't afford to, hence her jumping with all 3 so they wouldn't end up in work houses. Unfortunately they did and their lives were fucking miserable.

My Grandma lost a son at 6 months old and spent the better part of a decade on Valium and is still racked with anxiety all the time.

I've attempted suicide before and so have 2 of my siblings.

My extended maternal side is also full of people who "suffer with nerves" and were housebound for most of their adult lives, reasons for that are unknown to me.

There is a strong genetic element as well as circumstancial elements to MH issues and all are complex and not easily plumped into one basket.

We are bringing up children to have high expectations as to what constitutes success, happiness and wealth. I’ve listened to so many teenagers who want to be YouTube sensations, influencers and be famous or loaded. When I ask what they would like to be famous for often the aims are vague or unrealistic. Having a degree seems to often bestow an entitlement to a certain type of jobs and being unwilling to consider anything seen as not good enough or that does not recognise or reward their achievements.

Emotional pain seems to be something that needs to be immediately sorted out either by talking or drug therapy. There is a lack of acknowledgement that being heartbroken after a loss or crisis is entirely to be expected and that it’s normal and unless it doesn’t get easier does not need to be treated as an illness. There is often a sense of disbelief when something shit happens to us rather than the thought well why not me?

We need to put our phones and our tablets and our xboxes etc aside and live authentically. And that includes me as I’m a total phone addict. It’s not good.

@zafferana The 50s were hard but there was far more social mobility in the 50s and 60s that there is now.

@GeftheGoose social mobility is only one facet. My DM was growing up in the 50s and she doesn't have much good to say about it. Her family were MC, but poor by today's standards and women were slaves to household tasks we have machines for nowadays - hardly halcyon days.