Nothing to fear but modern life

from TheStar.com

It will surprise almost no one to learn that a public opinion survey released yesterday suggests depression and stress are rising in the Canadian workforce.

But, tempting as it is to think otherwise, it's not necessarily our jobs and bosses grinding us down and fraying our nerves, the study says. It's modern life itself.

As put by Bill Wilkerson, founder of the Global Business and Economic Roundtable on Addiction and Mental Health, the source of our mounting distress is "a complex of social pressures gathering like storm clouds across the work and family lives of Canadians."

Probably nothing – outside of war and George W. Bush, which can only add to our stress and depression – has been studied in recent years quite so much as our own (rising) anxiety and (increasingly manic) search for happiness.

Volumes say our cerebral circuits and capacity for contentment have been all but blown by the "techno-creep" of a 24/7, fast-forward, multi-tasking world.

There are books saying we've been rendered despairing by an unprecedented range of distant or abstract things to fret about.

A syndrome called "anticipation-induced anxiety" says many of us are so obsessed with what the future might bring we often overlook how good we have it now.

We suffer "status anxiety," "choice anxiety," "collapse anxiety." And that's not the only way we are our own worst enemies.

Research suggests we're happier around other people, that the married are happier than the single, people happier in big families than in small – yet our relationships are increasingly virtual, marriage is an endangered species and the birth rate dwindles apace.

As much as anything, analysts say, we're made disconsolate by our outlandish expectations, comparisons no longer made with the Joneses next door, but elites of Hollywood, Wall Street, Silicon Valley.

In Hello, I'm Special, Hal Niedviecki notes pop-cult narratives tell us "that, despite ordinariness, you too can be special, super, noticed, discovered, successful."

What a downer it is to find it ain't necessarily so.

Gregg Easterbrook's book, The Progress Paradox, is an account of how, by most tangible measures, Western life has never been better, yet people keep feeling worse.

There's more of everything except happiness, he says. "We live in a favoured age but do not feel favoured."

In his book Faster, James Gleick argues we could say no to the stress-inducing mantra of newer, quicker, bigger, more. Much we complain of, he says, are choices freely and enthusiastically made.

"We humans have chosen speed and we thrive on it – more than we generally admit. Our ability to work fast and play fast gives us power. It thrills us."

Maybe so. But as Daniel Gilbert says in Stumbling on Happiness, most of us spend much of our lives turning rudders and hoisting sails "only to find that Shangri-La isn't what and where we thought it would be."

Luckily, Easterbrook cites research that might plot the course to stress reduction.

Studies have shown, he reports, the old are happier than the young; millionaires are no happier than those of average income; the disabled and chronically ill report a higher sense of well-being than the population at large (perhaps because of a heightened appreciation of life); the psychological norm is not endless euphoria, but being "slightly satisfied" with one's lot.

Cheer you up?

Didn't think so.

And you still have to go to work today.