I don't know that anyone has ever attempted a history of stress and anxiety, and if they have, it might be tough to do and therefore questionable in the first place.
Indeed, it might in some ways be impossible, in part because the nature of stress and anxiety and related conditions have been perceived differently in different eras, if noticed at all. In the 18th Century the Melancholic personality, which we'd regard as a Depressive one, was celebrated as a romantic condition as it was perceived that such people simply felt everything too deeply, an observation that was perhaps not entirely inaccurate. Shakespeare made Hamlet, the Melancholy Dane, the subject of his famous play of no later than 1602. It's a justifiably famous play, but in recent years its hard not to find the character of Hamlet a bit too mopey, and the character of Ophelia as oddly undeveloped.
Edwin Booth as Hamlet, 1870.
King Henry VI slipped into such a deep funk, perhaps caused by the monumental strain of being a monarch in an era when somebody was always looking to depose you from inside the country or attack you from without, that he slipped into severe mental illness episodes starting in 1453 and he was deposed in 1461 (and murdered shortly thereafter). While he attempted to lead on occasion, for much of that period, he was completely incapacitated by his condition.
King Henry VI. While Sheakespeare's Hamlet may have been a depressed fictional prince, King Henry VI was a real one, which lead to periods of complete incapacity and ultimate his death.
Genetics and stress may have pushed King Henry VI over the edge, but it's not too hard to find other examples of lesser figures who similarly suffered. "Soldier's Heart" was identified as a condition that afflicted combat veterans during the Civil War, which means that it must have existed in prior conflicts as well, as the combat soldier of the American Civil War wasn't really all that different than the combat soldier of the American Revolution or the English Civil War. Certainly by the end of the Great War Shell Shock was well identified as a psychological condition, from which some afflicted never recovered.
Australian first aid station, World War One.
Less dramatic but just as well noted, the condition described as a "nervous breakdown" was well attested to from at least the early 20th Century up through its third quarter. The term "nervous breakdown" was once widely used as a medical term but now no longer is, although its still used as a non medical one. It's generally regarded as a period fo itnense anxiety, stress and depression (hmmm. . .just what we're talking about here) leading to a period of incapacitation. While the term is no longer used, the condtion described still occurs, so its still something, sort of, at least. The term has been used to describe periods of mental incapacitation in such famous varied people as Marilyn Monroe to Kanye West.
Indeed, one of the oddities of nervous breakdowns is that while they were hardly limited (or more particularly are hardly limited) to the famous, at one time quite a few well to do people reportedly had them, which routinely lead them taking "the cure", which was usually a very long vacation. We'll get to that later on, but that's oddly modern in some ways.
On nervous conditions not being limited to the famous, a close friend of mine once related how her grandfather, a railroad worker with a large family, had a nervous breakdown over the birth of her mother, as he was realtively advanced in eyars at the time (60s?). Having had a large family already, he just couldn't deal with the stress of an added child late in life. Closer to home, it's family lore that my mother's father suffered from something like a nervous breakdown when young and as a result was sent for "the cure" in Hawaii. Whatever was the case, it's clear that he was a high strung fellow in lifelong poor health and he certainly suffered from high anxiety, a condition that lead him to drink quite a bit until he suddenly one day simply quit drinking entirely. As my grandmother's late in life poor health also resulted in her being unable to, shall we say, engage in marital duties that was lost to him as well and yet he was, late in life, pretty much universally cheerful, which says something about his personality and perhaps provides a lesson in this overall thread.
Given all of this above, there'd be real reason to doubt that stress and anxiety are really on the rise. And yet it is reported that in recent decades they are, and there does seem to be good reason to believe that stress and anxiety, let's call it Angst, are on the rise. Indeed, mental health professionals commonly report it so, and we see all sorts of societal reactions, most probably wholly ineffective, but a few that are likely on to something, being floated here and there.
So what's going on here?
We'll, we aren't licensed to really opine, but that's never stopped us before, so we'll add our thoughts about what is going on to cause this modern plague here in this thread. Before we do, however, we'll note that we sort of touched on this before, here in this thread:
A Western World Modern Crisis: Suicide
Indeed, that thread directly deals with this topic and is worth revisiting. And shoot, it's less than a year old as well.
Indeed, that thread noted much of what we're noting here, even though our reason for posting this one, a series of recent news articles, isn't directly the same. Our earlier item, anyhow, noted the following:
The first one was a headline which noted that Americans are dying of suicide and alcoholism at all time record highs.
U.S. deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide hit highest level since record-keeping began
Alcoholism, if that's correct, would be amazing, and I'd at least somewhat question that figure as the alcoholic rates before Prohibition were stunning. But the suicide one deserves some attention, and an increasing rate of alcoholism also does.
Of course, we have to be aware that statistics are only relevant in the context of the period they address, and this one only addresses a fairly compact period of time. The USA Today article noted:
The number of deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide in 2017 hit the highest level since federal data collection started in 1999, according to an analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data by two public health nonprofits.
The national rate for deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide rose from 43.9 to 46.6 deaths per 100,000 people in 2017, a 6 percent increase, the Trust for America's Health and the Well Being Trust reported Tuesday. That was a slower increase than in the previous two years, but it was greater than the 4 percent average annual increase since 1999.
Deaths from suicides rose from 13.9 to 14.5 deaths per 100,000, a 4 percent increase. That was double the average annual pace over the previous decade.
Anyhow, let's start with something obvious. And in doing so, we'll link in a few things here that we've noted before.
Let's start with our Third Law of Behavior:
Here's something we noted earlier on this topic.
There's a seeming epidemic of suicide in the Western World. In at least one area of the East, Japan, suicide has been at blistering levels for decades.
This is not true, however, of all societies everywhere. Most specifically, it isn't true of those areas of the world that remain more rural than the West, and frankly more agrarian, and more authentically religious. And by religious, I mean in the real sense, not the vague meaningless "spiritual but not religious" sense that Western "moderns" sometimes profess or in the Western Hollywood Buddhist sense.**
Our species has been around for a really long time. It'll turn out, I'm confident, that as a species we've been around a lot longer than we now believe we were. But we have only lived the way most of us do now for a very, very, brief time. For almost our entire history as a species we were nomadic. Following that, we were agrarians for a long time. We've become what we are not, urbanized, only very briefly and we've become urbanized in our current massive way only very, very recently.
In fact, nature is giving moderns the dope slap. You weren't made to live in a giant city of millions working in an office of thousands for a company of thousands with a rootless career. But that's what we've come around to and what we celebrate. No, nature figures you ought to be out in sticks, maybe the veld, or the steppes, or in short nature, living a natural life and nature isn't interested in any of your wacky diets of the moment, vegan, essential oils, baloney. Kill a deer and eat is what nature figures, and that doesn't take 40 hours every week to accomplish.
Put another way, Great Thunberg, age 16, just reported that her recent fame pulled out of a year long depression. She's 16 years old
No doubt, you figure, her intense angst over the environment is causing this depression?
No, it's probably her moronic diet and deeply unnatural lifestyle.
Just fifty years ago most Swedes, which is what Thunberg is, were farmers or fishermen. They're famous for being dour, but that was a product of their combined think resources and the harsh brand of Evangelical Lutheranism that came to dominate in Scandinavia in the late 19th Century. Strict adherence to the Evangelical Lutheran Church has greatly waned as the Swedes became wealthy (like lots of people, the Swedes found the Gospels inconvenient when they had money and the pill), but in another way it lingers on in a dour view of life, now added to through the messed up concept that one diet or another will extend your life forever, the more unnatural it is the better.
Now, I don't really mean to pick on the 16 year old directly as I figure her stupid diet and her being used in the manner she is, no matter what you think of the cause, isn't her fault or even really doing. Left to their own devices and a chance to run their own households a sizable minority of 16 year olds would make bad decisions. No, the point is that now that we've lost contact with nature in a direct form, the entire Western World is making bad choices.
This blog has, obviously, focused on the past and the past of a century ago. Let's not fall into the illusion that everything in the past was perfect. That's far from true. But let's also not pretend that evolutionary biology has skipped us. We're not really made to do what we're doing, in the examples of most people.
And, to take it out further, in the very modern world, the intense devotion to money and material goods has unhinged us.
The post World War Two world has been vastly rich. When the free market economy nations, which of course were the democratic nations, by and large, of the post war era triumphed over Communism in the Cold War, that process of wealth ramped up even more than it had. Capitalist like to point out, and quite rightly, that capitalism has lifted huge swatches of the globe out of poverty. Indeed, again only fifty or so years ago, the majority of human beings once lived in poverty. And as we've noted here before, prior to World War Two most Americans were middle class, but lower middle class on the edge of poverty constantly, and even when things were good.
Economically, therefore, we're now far, far better off, globally, than every before. But at the same time the real question now is whether we can handle that wealth. The evidence isn't good. We've clearly become obsessed with it and we've become extremely narcissistic about it. We live in hideous conditions, in real terms, for wealth, we enter career occupations solely due to it, we live in cities because of it, and we avoid children and dump spouses due to it. More recently, a lot of younger people avoid marriage entirely and simply live in a series of sad shacking ups, which implies the ability to leave somebody who nature has bonded, through their conduct, at the drop of a dollar bill.
Nature doesn't like that. Not any of it.
Indeed, as we earlier noted:
Well so what, you may ask. Haven't sociologist determined that agrarian life was miserable and people moved to the cities to be super happy?
No, well not any more anyhow.
There was at one time a running line of sociological thought, propaganda really, that basically ran just that way. But more recent research has determined that nomadic people today, who are admittedly very few in number, are the happiest people on earth hands down. Next to them, people who are basically agrarian in nature fit that category. The least happy people on Earth are those who live in highly urbanized societies. And as we now know Western suicide is beginning to become a plague, meaning we're joining the highly urbanized Japanese in that tragic classification.
Depression and anxiety are nature's wake up calls. Nature is giving us a dope slap.
As we earlier put it:
It really doesn't require all that much thought. But we won't think about it as it runs entirely contrary to the concept of "progress" and the intellectual dictatorship of progressivism we are now in.
We're a really smart animal, but an animal none the less, and we were evolved to live out in the wilds. That's where, it truly turns out, we are the happiest. In our native state we hunted and gathered, which more accurately means we hunted, gathered and existed in subsistence nomadic agriculture. We at some point evolved the latter into a more fixed form, but often missed in that is that early agriculture was an adjustment of the existing pattern, not an abolishment of it. In hunter gatherer societies, the men principally engaged in hunting and the women in gathering and both in some farming, quite often. In agrarian societies, even fairly modern ones, the men engaged in the farming, the women supported the farming, but the men were almost always still hunters. If you look at a society that was agrarian fairly recently, such as Finland or Norway, you'll find that hunting and fishing is always common. Even in Ireland, which was agrarian to a large extent up until the Celtic Tiger changed that and began to change Ireland to its ultimate misery, that was more true than we might suppose, with fishing, bird hunting and small game hunting common in a land that was otherwise obsessed with depriving the population of the means of rebelling in the same fashion which it had only recently against the English.
What are the features of such a life?
Close connection to nature is one thing. Nature for such populations is everyday and immediate, not something that they encounter, probably in a sanitized form, on vacation somewhere. Not the safe nature that people who pay to ride on a zip line in Costa Rica encounter either.
To add to this, one of the things contributing to our anxiety is forgetting the past, along with forgetting evolutionary biology, which gets us to this:
Holscher's Fourth Law of Behavior. Old standards existed for a real reason.
Out of combination of desperation, narcissism and wealth, the tail end of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st have been marked by a dumping of old standards in celebration of what amounts to a new "Me Decade" on steroids. It's been taken to the absurd level.
At almost any earlier time in history people who lived well defined themselves by things outside themselves. The now highly celebrated "Greatest Generation" is celebrated due to the imperfect and inaccurate memory of them as a class of men who left their homes, families and their lives, for the greater good of 1) their nation and 2) the world as a whole. In other words, they're remembered as people who gave up something for everyone and not for themselves.
In contrast to that, we now have the absolute celebration not only of the individual, but the interior mind of the individual, no matter how poorly formed. Wealth and the pill have given individuals in the Western World time to do not much other than feed their inclinations. This has in recent years been focused on sex, one of the most trivial things imaginable to be obsessed on an existential level about, although this trend, in fairness, started as long ago as the during the influential period of Sigmund Freud.
Sigmund Freud, unscientific weirdo.
Truth be known, if approached from a scientific prospective, and again from evolutionary biology,t he entire sex thing sorts out pretty easily. There are two genders and only two. Human beings are possessed of a high sex drive. In a state of nature people pair up generally in their twenties and the resulting bond, while perhaps beset by the assaults of time and trials, is generally lifelong.
Humans are also a species that's best by lots of individual deviations many of which are destructive and cause us misery. Eat too much you get fat and can die, which doesn't mean that certain people aren't super driven towards food. Alcohol may have made the water safe but drink too much of it and you'll die. You should sleep around eight hours every night but some people can't and that shortens their lives.
Modern life contributes to all of that. It would have been really hard to become a fat Cro Magnon. There probably weren't any. You don't see any photographs of chubby Native Americans in Edward Curtis films, nor do you find any of chubby yeoman farmers in anyone's photographs, nor of obese 19th and early 20th Century cowboys. But they had extremely active lives and they didn't eat a lot of process high fat, high sugar, food. Likewise, there have been alcoholics for a long, long time, but chances are that the numbers in the Middle Ages, even when alcohol was hte normal drink for most, weren't that high. Most yeoman farmers and Native Americans no doubt slept the whole night through peacefully. And so on. And, no matter what their inclinations on an individual basis was, nobody went around demanding that they be identified by who they wanted to bed, or how many, or under what terms, at any time in human history right up until the 21st Century.
The fact that we make such demands now is a symptom of our misery, idleness and purposelessness. The biographer of Field Marshall Bernard Law Montgomery was of the opinion that the Field Marshall was a homosexual, and indeed his son likewise had that opinion. But they were also of the opinion that Montgomery, who was an extremely busy man, wasn't even aware of it if he was. John Ford, the filmmaker, routinely fell in love with multiple actresses according to his biographer, but in spite of rumors that exist to the contrary, his biographer was of the opinion that while he fell deeply in love with some, he remained loyal to his wife Mary, and his Catholic faith, and deeply devoted to his craft. Roger Casement may have had very strong homosexual inclinations, or he may have been framed by British agents so that people believced that, but his defining characteristics were his dedication to humanitarian causes and Irish indpendence.
The point of all of this is something that Max Hastings, the famous British historian, noted at a speech he delivered to American university students following the release of his book on the Vietnam War. When asked how students of the 1960s who opposed the war compared to students today, Hastings simply noted that he hoped current students would think about something that wasn't as trivial as sex.
My point is a little broader, however. The absolutely manic focus on everyone self defining in every single way is because that same 60s generation tore down the concept that the old standards meant anything. They very much did, and we keep trying to grope our way back to them. At the same time, society is also engaged in the absurd concept that everyone can self define what they are and who they are. They can't, as we're all members of the same species, and that actually defines most of what we are, and who we are. The differences we otherwise see are very often extremely trivial and, beyond that, may simply be erroneous and inaccurate self assumptions based upon living in unnatural conditions without much to do.
Straying off of this a bit, another aspect of this is the manic emphasis on career.
There have always been "careers", but for much of human history most people occupied a fairly manual labor set of careers and the emphasis on career was limited to a few, and even then it was rarely expressed at the manic level things are now.
Now, you simply must have a career. You must. You won't be fulfilled if you don't have a career.
Well, we've long known that careers don't fulfill anyone. And yet the lie continues on. Indeed, not only does it continue, it's spread to where now women, who formerly weren't under the same pressure that they must have a career, are. The great lie of female advancement is that men have let them into the fulfillment of careers. In fact, due economic developments, they've been forced upon them.
As noted, careers have always been around, but the emphasis on careerism was not present in the same degree, except really among the upper economic classes, where oddly the truly wealthy were exempt from it. Now, everyone is subject to the continually pressure of career success.
I've seen this among the young, but even among the old. In some fields the career pressure has reached the point where people of retirement age are expected not to. Indeed, I just oddly had a conversation with a lawyer (I'm not of retirement age) on this myself, in which they suggested that I should switch party emphasis in the law field and could have a "long career as a plaintiff's lawyer ahead" of me. At my age, 56, I don't have a long anything ahead of me, but why would somebody even conceive of a person approaching 60 years of age as wanting to have decades of future hard work in front of them? That's an odd thought, but not odd anymore in the legal field where people really aren't ever supposed to retire. That same view isn't unique to this field, however, but is common in business as well.
As part of all of this the old, and normal, focus of people on having "jobs" to support their families is gone. Now people actually talk about their families or their spouses supporting their careers. That's really messed up, and people know that at their core.
Then there's the news:
The news media has existed for a long time, and indeed since the introduction of the wire service early in the 20th Century the ability to get up to date news daily has been very much there.
But what only became the case recently is the screaming immediacy of all news. Fires in Australia, Ebola in Africa, all the way down to major car wrecks in distant cities and crime in places that we don't live come screaming through to us all the time.
We aren't really built to take that and it contributes to the idea that everything is a disaster, when in fact in spite of the bad things we have to contend with being bad, things really aren't as bad as they once were.
So what to do about all of this?
Well, there's plenty of advice, and much of it just leads to more stress.
One of the most pronounced characteristics of the current age is to find problems that are rooted in fairly recent changes in our societal behavior, and then suggest that we need to do something new to address them, when in fact what we might need to do is the one thing that never occurs to us. . . go back.
There's a widespread western belief that you can't go back. But you most definitely can, and history has shown that again and again. And even if we won't go back to a prior era completely (and we wouldn't want to), we can revive and apply those things from nature and our natures that were proven to work as they were part of nature and our natures.
That means, however, giving up a lot of narcissism, which has come to nearly define western values. We aren't the center of everything. It also means giving up the idea that you can have it all or that you even should. You can't, you won't, and you shouldn't.
Slow down and get out there. Try the old things that worked before espousing the new ones, which often don't. Things existed, including standards and ways of life, for a reason.
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