Is our Generation More Stressed than the Previous Ones?

Nowadays, stress is becoming a common problem. Our younger generation thinks that modern life is generally much more stressful than in the past. However, others say that the amount of stress people have today is overstated as older generations coped with more pressure, but they never thought about such a phenomenon as “stress”. This contradiction makes many people compare the negative aspects of stress to society today and in the past.
On the one hand, the previous generations experienced great stress because of poor living conditions, food shortage and numerous wars, which were taking away millions of people’s lives. Moreover, they did not have such helpful technologies, which make the life of a modern person easier. Besides, without an advanced medical system, many people died of simple illnesses and diseases because there were no necessary medicines and vaccines. That is why life expectancy in the past was much lower than it is now.
On the other hand, because of the increasing pace of life nowadays people are always in a chronic rush, which causes various mental and physical health problems, such as backache, depression, fatigue, headaches, high blood pressure, and insomnia. What is more, almost everybody in our modern society is trying to achieve high standard of living, therefore, people have to spend long hour at work. As a result, they feel overworked and burn out, and hardly have time to relax and escape from everyday routine, which leads them to losing their balance between work and personal life.

Furthermore, there is no doubt that several decades ago, the environment was much better than today with fresh water, air and food, whereas today we face air, water and noise pollution, which of course contribute to the symptoms of stress. In addition, nowadays, the majority of people lives in big and overcrowded cities and suffer from such common city problems as standstill traffic congestions, unemployment, high crime rate and high cost of living.
The unemployment rate is constantly increasing; hence, the number of job-seeker is growing, which leads to the increasing competitiveness in job opportunities. In my opinion, each generation suffers from stress; the difference is in the attitude to it. To my mind, today time is more compressed than ever and because of the speedy pace of life and everyday overload, people feel exhausted as human beings are not designed for a prolonged, high-speed activity.
However, we have to admit that in a certain sense our ancestors had their own reasons of stress, which should not be underestimated. To sum up, stress has been felt by all generations in their lives. It is really hard to compare either modern generation, or the previous one is under more stress than the other one because each generation has its own problems. People would better concentrate on reducing the number of stress and try to make future living conditions more favorable.