Their fault. They removed all the real stressors but didn’t give us brains that can cope with not being stressed. Now we have to pull stress out of thin air—or grapefruit.
Yeah I'd like to see them pick between 17 kinds of peanut butter.
This just reminded me of a moment I had, years ago.
I was so stressed from work, working on my 6th burnout for the year.
I was meant to be getting stuff for dinner from the supermarket.
I had money, that wasn't the issue. But I didn't have a shopping list. My partner and I had just briefly discussed myself 'picking up something' on my way home.
I was paralyzed. My thoughts wouldn't align or connect. I couldn't think of any dinner option we'd ever had. So I couldn't configure a shopping list in my head. I think I stood in the canned vegetable aisle and just stared ahead, trying not to cry.
I ended up sitting on a bench in the middle of the shopping centre trying to write a list on my phone. Eventually I had to call my partner and tell him I wasn't okay and he needed to come get me.
Long story lacking events I know. But this meme made me think. Short of family emergency/death of loved ones, work is the only thing that has placed that kind of stress on me. Even in grief I have a sense of one foot in front of the other for any particular task. But burn out made me immobile. Completely saturated my brain and made it stop working.
Our brains aren't built for that. They shouldn't be.
My wife works a high-stress job. Every day I make sure to tell her to please don't take anything that happens today (at work) too seriously. It's just a day job. I worry about how it's going to affect her in her old age. Some days, after work, you'd swear she's been chased by bear or something.
See my above response. It's honestly not helpful advice sometimes.
Often the only answer is quitting/doing something completely different. And that often isn't possible for people.
Burnout is the death by a thousand cuts. It's not usually "this ONE thing about my job sucks". It's typically "this is due, that is due, this person is a dick, we have a massive project coming up that we're not prepared for, this person isn't contributing enough, etc".
All these little things beat us down, And it's important to figure, which ones you have no control over, and which can you solve. Try to stop worrying about the ones without control and attempt to focus on those that can be fixed. It may not be all of them but it should help.
Oh I work for myself now, this was years ago, I'm a far better employer :)
But be careful with this kind of advice. Some people's jobs require that they do need to worry about things they can't control. Other people, namely. And that's literally the job description.
The addict's prayer or whatever it's called is not applicable to a lot of jobs.
Your ancestors would be panicking worse at the grocery store, they couldn’t possibly conceive of something like a refrigerator.
Yeah honestly society to them might be some terrible psychological horror. The small things you can do to get you arrested like walking into a forest (trespassing), removing restrictive garments (public nudity), sleeping in a comfy field of grass in the one area without monolithic grey cliffs (sleeping in a park where it's not allowed), picking up and using a tool (theft) etc etc. It's a nightmare realm with black magic machines, eternal sun indoors, unclean air, no natural food sources in cities, loud sounds everywhere and uncooperative people.
no they definitely could, people in the past would try to figure out how stuff worked and if they couldn't they chalked it up to magic and went on with their day.
remember that for most of human history people genuinely and whole-heartedly believed magic was real and it wast just a part of daily life.
I think the caveman wouldn't fare any better :)
There was a (possibly unethical) experiment where scientists tried to induce stress symptoms (lack of appetite, depression, panic, etc.) in rats.
They found that sudden scares or bringing the rats face-to-face with predators had little long term effect. But placing them on a floor with a constant, slightly uncomfortable electric current (low-level stress over a longer period) did cause them to develop all the symptoms.
So perhaps we're just not naturally equipped to deal with permanent time pressure, upcoming appointments and deadlines in the way modern society gives them to us.
If you put a caveman in a busy Woolies aisle they would 100% chimp out and kill someone in order to escape.
well that's very specifically why you're having a panic attack in a grocery store: we're evolved to handle occasional clearly defined threats like hungry lions, so when we're then instead exposed to constant low-level threats that we can't do shit about, our brains frazzle out.
We're constantly running at threat level: wolf-fight imminent. Its just we don't know where the wolf we're supposed to fight is. And it stresses us out
The modern wolves are the corporations responsible for shrinkflation, and causing us all decision fatigue by offering too many different brands with too many different meaningless-but-slightly different options.
I'm pretty sure they'd be proud and confused
"Wow, look at the amount of food our descendant can choose from. They'll never go hungry. Look they're even shaking with excitement in the cereal aisle. Huh, they're crying while standing in front the boxes. Must be tears of joy. And now they've fallen over and curled up in a ball... Weird."
"I think they're having a panic attack."
"What? Why?"
"I think they can't decide which cereal to buy."
"But there's so many to pick from, they can just grab any one of them and be set."
"Yeah I think that may be the problem, they got stuck deciding which one to grab and shut down."
"But they can just grab any of them."
"But what if they grab the wrong one?"
"I don't understand."
"Don't worry, they don't either."
- Based on a true story (I didn't know they made a new kind of Honey Bunches of Oats and it broke me once)
They'd smile upon you if they saw how relatively easily you can access such an abundance of food
Yeah, I've seen their porn statues, they'd be all for the obesity epidemic.
God help them if someone shows them the Pornhub BBW tag.
Honestly, there’s good odds their interpretation would be ‘poor kid, they’re getting fucked with by the spirits.’
Honestly, it's their fault for not being properly protective ancestors.
skill issue
There's a good chance some of your ancestors became cat food. They probably understand stress
I'm pretty sure as they were fighting wild animals, they were all Y'know, this sucks. Let's invent things so our children's children never have to fight wild animals just to live.
I think I'd prefer taking on the occasional mountain lion with my tribe to working 50 hr weeks, but I guess they made the choice for me.
almost: nobles made the choice for you.
the majority of our ancestors are just people, who did the obvious thing and worked towards making life as easy and enjoyable as possible.
but then some ten thousand years ago nobles became a thing and ever since then they've exploited the common people for their own gain, and instead worked to make life MORE stressful for the average person because they didn't give a shit about them.make your ancestors proud: eat the rich
Yes, modern primitives work eight hours a week compared to us. On the other hand, it's not the mountain lions. It's famine and plague that will kill you (and your family) horribly. The ones killed by a wandering bear are the lucky ones.
That ancestor is way too old and by a long shot, the average prehistoric lifespan was around twenty years.
And who's to say they wouldn't have panicked also at being surrounded by twenty brands of cheddar jalapeño onion ranch cheese puffs and a hundred similar sugar flavors of sugar-filled cereal with a sugar coating on top as part of this complete nutritious breakfast?
Average lifespan is heavily influenced by infant mortality. If you made it to age 20 without dying there was a good chance you would make it to 60+.
The grocery store is not my friend. I feel this meme.
I guarantee 30 mins in walmart with me, and I'd have made the first serial killer when I send them back.
