The war against stress reduction
If there was ever an environment in which people should actually be paid to live in it, the early 21st century Earth is that environment. There's nothing "natural" about human life any more. Human horizons have shrunk to a screen. Lifestyle choices are now a series of mediocre stereotypes which are nearly 100 years old. Stress is the reality of human existence.
"Stress reduction" is effectively an empty phrase.
People could be forgiven for thinking that society is doing everything possible
to prevent stress reduction. To some extent that actually is the case. Every
form of do-it-yourself stress reduction is either illegal or immoral.
High-priced pharmaceuticals which don't do the job are apparently neither
illegal or immoral. Apparently the concept of inventing a safe, portable form of stress reduction hasn't occurred to anybody.
One of the most common medical conditions on Earth at the moment is depression. Society doesn't want to know. Such is the culture of denial that there had recently been a spate of press releases stating that depression isn't at epidemic levels. That would explain the fact that antidepressants are among the biggest sellers on the entire global pharmaceutical market.
It is interesting to note that prior to the present era of
"social management by unelected, insular, irrelevant nobodies" clinically diagnosed mental
illness was actually a rarity. Now, apparently, it's compulsory.Imagine a society in which you actually have to pay to be miserable. Not exactly difficult to imagine, is it?
Historically, it would be incorrect to say that the 20th century was a period of low stress for the human race, what with all those wars and things. However, society and the public generally seem to manage stress better during global wars and pandemics than they do now.
The social environment has changed dramatically. Workplace stress is perhaps the most common of all, and approximately 25% of the workforce is either about to leave a job, or looking for another job on that basis. Social stress, caused by decades of social mismanagement is of course another factor.
The ability to live in a crime ridden, hopelessly out of date society which refuses to take responsibility for its own condition is an acquired skill. Some people don't acquire that skill. They suffer severe stress, and, naturally, that is all their own fault.
The apparent refusal to recognize any degree of social stress on the part of all global societies is either an indication of laziness or stupidity, but more probably an indication of both with a healthy level of corruption and total incompetence.
It is interesting to observe that societies with the most moralists and political ideologues are the ones with the most stress. Religious and political fanatics are considered normal, and people locked in an office with psychotics are considered to have normal careers and lifestyles. Economic factors are also apparently not considered causes of stress. Most of the population of the planet Earth now lives in an environment where they can afford practically nothing that they actually need.
There is, naturally, is humanity's fault. Having been so
tactless as to have been born, people are naturally responsible for the total
lack of economic and social opportunities they experience. The incredibly large number of
highly qualified people thrown on the scrap heap every year is a testimony to
society's actual response to these issues. The gigantic number of people they don't even make it to the economic levels of the scrap heap is much larger.
No form of human need is recognized, at any level. Therefore, you would think, stress could also safely be ignored. Strangely, that's not the case. It seems that the real values of stress are impossible even for a completely ignorant and determinedly irresponsible society to ignore.
Stress is now a commercial product. It is worth billions of
dollars in antidepressants, and forms the social motif for the society. Try and
find any form of mass media in which stress isn't portrayed as
"funny" or isn't used as the core subject for media material.
Therefore stress must actually be promoted. Stress is quite literally worth billions of dollars.
Like its predecessors, "greed is good", "crime and poverty is cool", and "criminals are heroes", "stress is wonderful" is yet another product of society's fruit fly brains. The public has the privilege to pay for this idiocy, both personally and financially.
- Have social conditions been improved to reduce stress?
- Has the highly contaminated physical environment been improved?
- Has there been any recognition in the employment market of stress as a major destructive factor?
- It is simply being alive from second to second more or less difficult?
- Are there any easy ways out of high stress environments?
Of course not. Quite the opposite. The old standby do-it-yourself stress relief mechanisms are becoming progressively more expensive and therefore less accessible. The social environment is in fact considered normal, therefore nothing needs to be done about it, either.
Whole generations have now grown up in the belief that a disease-ridden, crime- soaked society which does absolutely nothing useful on principle is perfectly normal. The "nanny society" concept created by that paragon of human intelligence Margaret Thatcher and supported by Einstein's missing twin brother Ronald Reagan is now the accepted response to doing anything at all about social environments. Thatcher's "children's children" have emerged into a sewer.
On the so-called "liberal progressive" side of the fence, a total lack of ideas is also now considered normal. For supposedly progressive people, the idea of changing a failed society seems to be a bit too hard. The rhetoric emerges in deluges, and absolutely nothing happens.
If you remember the "make poverty history" charade, you also remember that the minute the buzzword was created, every celebrity, politician and other useless piece of social garbage jumped on the bandwagon. Poverty is in fact the primary historical stress environment. Any sort of achievement whatsoever in putting an end to poverty would have been a major social event.
Again, nothing happened. People trained by society to ignore social conditions on the ground that it has nothing to do with them can hardly be expected to go on a sudden crusade to end poverty. A collection of feather brained media products also isn't exactly the best raw material for conducting a concerted effort.
The war against stress reduction is doing a lot of collateral damage. People who would otherwise be able to make major contributions to humanity can't even be heard in this environment. While billions of people suffer, the infantile, brattish antics of extremely rich, extremely useless individuals are the main social topics. Major medical breakthroughs are objected to and blocked on "moral grounds". Science has effectively gone backwards after creating the technology which runs the society, in terms of public profile and respect for its judgement.
Human health is now also irrelevant. Apparently, anybody can go around spreading whatever diseases they feel like spreading, and if you can't pay for treatment, too bad. A hopelessly mal-administered health system is apparently now considered to be a democratic right.
(Capitalism has totally lost any sense of direction. It no longer knows how to manage itself effectively, and doesn't even understand why it should. There is absolutely no social vision whatsoever coming from this direction. A kindergarten level of mentality is at work, the product of the "me generation". The people educated in the 80s are now the management age-group, and they were also the first truly illiterate products of tertiary education in law and business. They can manage accounts, but not situations and concepts.)
The main reason human beings are social is because in the past society used to be useful. Membership of the society and participation in society had mutual benefits. That hasn't been the case for decades. Society is now the primary cause of stress.
The war against stress reduction rages on, and the products are obvious. This is in fact total social failure. Communities hold together mainly because they must, not because they get any help in doing so.
People are supposed to grow up, but the society has apparently regressed to an unsupervised childhood. Even in theory, political science hasn't been able to progress beyond Plato and solve ancient problems which are instantly solvable if anybody makes the slightest attempt. The society doesn't even recognize the possibilities of its own technology and new social and employment modes.
Stress will be beaten when it does. Christmas is coming, too. Until then the war against stress reduction will wage itself, and everybody will remain targets for life's little nuclear strikes.