Comment by hattmall

I've read stress is probably much worse today because of the speed at which we experience stressful events. Sure famine and illness were a concern, and we still have to stress and concern ourselves about resource accumulation and illness today. But we also have a great deal of additional stress that didn't really exist at that time and much of it is stress that we have to simply put away to deal with other things so that we don't fall victim to MORE stressful situations. Just the fact that everytime you pass a car in opposing traffic you are about 5 feet away from having a total stranger kill you is a wildly stressful event that we mostly just abstract away and internalize in order to get where we are going at around 100ft per second. We also have the mental overhead of knowing that any sort of stressful event that happens we will become immediately aware of it.

It used to be a thing that people would have nervous breakdowns (panic attack) before checking the mail if they were worried about some impending news. Such as a son at war or a sick relative etc. Now we are simply in that state at pretty much any given time.