I don't quite remember what got me started on this, but a couple of hours ago I ran into a report about stress from the American Psychological Association. It reported that stress was simply overwhelming these days:
A quarter of all Americans report feeling so stressed on most days that "they can barely function." Among those under 35, half of all men and 62% of all women say they are "completely overwhelmed" by stress most of the time.
Shazam! Can this really be true? Is it just some COVID thing? Unfortunately, the APA doesn't make it easy to figure out because they vary their focus with every annual report. One year it's all about caregivers; the next it's about race; a couple of years later it's about social media. The only common finding is that the poor slobs who are the focus of each report are practically oozing with stress. But there's no way to track the basic "overwhelmed" question over time because the question hasn't even been asked most of the time.
However, there is one thing the APA tracks consistently: the average reported stress level on a scale of 1-10. Even this isn't easy to find, but it can be found. Here it is from 2007 (when the APA survey began) through 2022:
Average stress declined considerably between 2007 and 2011 for some reason, and since then has been almost completely flat.
So.......I dunno. We're less stressed than we were 15 years ago, and average stress didn't change even slightly during the COVID pandemic. Nonetheless, half the country under age 44 claims to be overwhelmed by stress almost all the time. That doesn't really seem to make sense. Nor does it gibe with long-term polls showing that only 10-15% of every age group report that they're unhappy. Surely if you're "overwhelmed" with stress you'd be unhappy? Or do most people have a different sense of what "overwhelmed" means than I do?
Color me confused. For now, I think I'm going to assume the APA is basically just an industry group with a vested interest in high levels of stress. This is why they promote a variety of shocking headlines but practically hide the simple indicator showing that overall stress is moderate and remains that way year in and year out.
As someone who works a lot with highschool and college-age kids, I can say that a *lot* of them are feeling overwhelmed and stressed in a way I don't recognize at all from my own youth. I think what's disappeared from America -- and, indeed, from much of the modern, Western world -- over the past 20 years or so (since 9/11 really) is a sense that the next generation will be better off than the one before it. That kind of optimism about America and our future that Ronald Reagan famously tapped into is pretty much gone these days, particularly among young people. The sense that they're just fucked economically, politically, environmentally, is really pervasive. I don't know what we can do about that. Study after study has shown that getting off social media is one sure way to improve your happiness, so maybe that would be a place to start...
Getting off social media isn't going to change observable reality on any of the fronts you mentioned. We really are all just fucked for the foreseeable, if not forever.
Guess you didn’t grow up in the Vietnam era. Most of the guys I knew ( and me) were afraid of getting drafted and getting our balls shot off in a war we didn’t believe in.
Young people are more liberal and liberals as a whole operate on a despair paradigm (conservatives do rage). However liberals fail to focus very much on things other than bad stuff and so people feel hopeless. Conservative teens are notably happier than liberal ones.
This is combined with the regiment structured nature of modern childhood means kids DON'T learn how to deal with stress at a young age so it's worse for them.
This isnt my ideas, its right there in the literature
The changes to childhood and the ubiquity of despair are very real. I think the liberal emphasis on the systemic nature of bad stuff reduces feelings of agency, which helps fuel the hopelessness.
But another factor involved for women under age 35 is taking care of small children. That is the prime age for having babies and toddlers, which adds extra stress, especially for women. And there is a lot of systemic badness within that, as well: daycare costs, career costs, cultural expectations, distribution of caregiving labor.
And I think that happiness and stress level are two very different things. I am a naturally happy person, and will call myself happy at the same time I'm so stressed that my body is breaking down from it.
More privilege on display, and ignorance of it!
What do you mean "for some reason"? Have you forgotten what the late-00s felt like? I'm more surprised that there wasn't a big uptick in 2015-2016 than anything else.
Why can't it be true that women aged 18-34 feel more stress than anyone else? You weren't one. Neither was I. But it's true that women *do* feel a lot of undue pressure, particularly in the young adult ages. It's notable that the charts aren't terribly different by gender after that age.
Also, the overall stress level chart averaging around 5 basically forever strikes me as confirmation of bad news, not that everything is fine.
Apples and oranges, to a large extent, and also missing data that would link the two aggregations enough to allow for conclusions about how they relate.
In the bottom chart people self-report a stress level of 5 on a scale of 10-- iow, compared to what it could conceivably be, what's your stress level now? Whereas in the top chart, people self-report how they feel about the level of stress on them. And there, lots of men and women under 35 say it's overwhelming, but that decreases with age and the gender difference essentially disappears.
What's missing is the self-reported stress level differentiated by age (gender too, but set that aside for now). In its absence, the temptation is to implicitly interpolate the aggregate to say that there's no age difference in stress level reporting. But that's totally not warranted, because not in the data. There's nothing to say that we wouldn't see under-35s reporting 8 of 10 and 65s reporting 2 of 10 if the information was available, and a pattern like that would tend to corroborate the top chart. But without that information, we can't say either way.
As far as how "happy" relates to "stress" or being overwhelmed, people could easily be thinking they're just incommensurate categories. Aren't we basically talking about off-the-cuff responses from average types?
Given the demographic breakdown of the country, the 2 charts seem to be roughly in agreement with each other.
Kevin claims that half of younger people cant be overhwelmed because he found a chart that shows the average reported stress for everyone is at a number 5 is well.....meaningless?
Another post where Kevin declares his decision before he knows anything about the amsubject, goes in search of supporting information, cant find any....but still uses meaningless chart as 'support'.
Yay internet!
I honestly think it has to do with the maturation phase of 16 to 25 or so. Before social media, the internet, ubiquitous news, etc. most kids didn't really have a clear view of what growing up truly entailed. They did it in small steps and it honestly was a lot easier. I remember my transition from living at home to getting my first apartment and paying for it with a job delivering pizza. It wasn't easy, but each step felt like it could be taken one at a time. Living alone, buying my own food, keeping up with my laundry, making sure my car insurance was paid.
I didn't really feel like I had to do it all at the same time and burdens didn't truly seem unbearable. Rent was about half what it is now in my area (this was 26 years ago) and I made about $9/hr delivering pizza. I definitely made mistakes, but I don't really remember being that scared of the consequences as much as people are now.
The hard part really is the money, I think. Young adults need access to jobs that pay closer to $18/hour to have the same experience. They need to be able to attempt college without getting annihilated by debt if they drop out. If they do drop out, then jobs they can get need to pay more or things like rent, power, food need to cost less.
The biggest difference is that now the kids have an inkling of what they are getting into and its scary and they're not equipped to handle the stress, because they feel like they have to grow up all at once and master it all at the same time or else they'll just be a big smear under the Great American Capitalism Machine.
More than in the past, I think the media/infotainment environment has flourished by keeping folks in a constant state of fear, outrage, worry, etc. Basically stressed out. All to drive eyes and ears to these groups wjile they chase the money.
Individual anecdotes become widespread "issues". Existential crisis piled one on top of another. This also pulls people out of their actual living experience and burdens them with external stresses unrelated to their daily lives. Adding to the sense of being "overwhelmed".
It's much harder to avoid in our current environment of media interconnectivity. Dopamine triggers to keep viewers absorbed, even if it makes them feel more stressed. And it's unsurprising that men and women may be affected differently. They obviously manage emotional states very differently. It's not better or worse, just different.
Gee whiz. The APA thinks everyone desperately needs therapy and drugs to make them feel better. Its just a coincidence that this will make their members more money . . .
The APA did not say that. They didnt even imply it.
Straw Man fail. Try again.
What would be useful, to me at least, is knowing what the survey folks meant by "stress" and getting responses for each category. Stress due to social media usage? Work/home balance? Fear of violence? Child rearing? Bullying (at home v at work)? Too many tasks that you alone must do? Insufficient emotional support?
The current numbers are pretty meaningless without knowing what in fact is being measured.
I was 35 when 9/11 happened. It did not change a thing. Even on the day, I said to a co-worker "My odds of dying in a terrorist attack went from 0 to 0 today."
2008? Nah - nothing surprising. Consequences of Greenspan put, coddling of banks and homeowners.
But 2016-23 is a different story that has shaken my belief in the ground rules of this society: there are none, beyond misogyny, contempt for the weak more generally, and self-interest.
2016: Trump elected, thanks to abysmal media incompetence, misogyny, and a prissy, vain FBI director and some Trumpy underlings.
2017-20: Comey firing, Zelensky call, impeachment, Lafayette Park, Helsinki, "stand back and stand by," etc. Zero consequences.
2020: Pandemic, potentially 1M U.S. deaths - now confirmed. U.S. public, perhaps because it's not terrorism, says "Screw the sick - they get what they deserve."
2020: Election is close - it shouldn't have been. Media still thinks Trump is cute and fun.
2021: For the first time, an institution actually stops Trump, but only in the face of actual insurrection. Fox knowingly lies about the election and voting machines, pays $787.5M to Dominion, and still keeps its broadcast license. Trump Georgia phone call comes to light.
2022-23: Trump flouts laws on classified information. NYT, once outraged by the wicked email lady, frames it as a "dispute" between Trump and the Justice Department. Biden puts an end to the Afghanistan insanity, and David "I love war" Remnick and other putatively liberal (they're not) figures have a multi-month sad over the lack of war-coverage opportunities for future journalists.
2022 [bonus round!]: SCOTUS says Girl Scouts can be forced to become mommies.
I spent 2016-23 learning that 50% of the United States electorate has no problem with ending democracy if they don't get their way, that the press is on the side of the wealthy, that young "progressives" hate women as much as the press does, and that there is no safety mechanism or group of adults who can be relied on to stop any insanity.
There are no Sophie Scholls anywhere among our CEOs, media, courts, educators or legislators. All believe they can step to one side and tut-tut after our system collapses: that somehow it won't affect them.
I am surprised that enough of the Capitol Police - some of whom helped the mob - military and Secret Service actually did their jobs on 1/6. I am certain it was out of fear of later prosecution, and not from a belief in our system.
I know a lot of people who aren't doing well psychologically. The Trump-COVID-1/6 trifecta completely eclipses 9/11 as an "it changed everything" moment.
And I have not mentioned global boiling, which is kicking into high gear. Mother Nature bats last, and is warming up in the on-deck circle. Ted Williams would have shat himself.
I think Keven is being Kevin here. He is laser beam focused on the data and not stepping back to see the big picture, as in the books by Judy Blume and a bunch of other young adult authors. Women have always ever been in stress at least in my memory and I think the world in which we're living is putting extra stress on women today, not just social media but all the precarity loaded on ordinary Americans if they aren't trust fund babies.