Long-term stress is the default mode of the 21st century • Hacker News Board

Re: Long-term stress is the default mode of the 21st century

#51

Post by sharadov » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

systemvoltage wrote: post #2

I’ve never been satisfied with the definition of stress. My dad always said “If things are going good, that means you’re not trying.” How do you reconcile normal challenges and hardships in life with what is defined as “stress”? In some ways, life without stress is boring and uneventful. At the same time stress is a negative thing that affects your health. It’s not clear to me what is defined as stress - I’ve read nu…

There is "chronic stress" which is caused by unanticipated events, is short term, but nevertheless helps you grow character and get stronger mentally. Then there is "acute stress" which is akin to death by a thousand cuts, which was designed to be activated only in truly stressful situations like fleeing from a tiger, but this has become the norm in our modern jobs.

Re: Long-term stress is the default mode of the 21st century

#52

Post by LatteLazy » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 6:39 PM UTC

prower wrote: post #43

LatteLazy wrote: post #30

We support ever more people not working. That means workers have to work harder for a smaller share. So workers suffer long term stress. So more of them drop out of work and the problem gets worse...

- If people are overworked and the employer can get away by burning out every employee, then the unions are not doing their job properly. - If less people are required to do the same amount of work, it means you're automating sucessfully, and that you should tax automation to compensate. Having an automated robot/script working 24/7 shouldn't relieve the company from its inherent social responsibilities. - If the abo…

You look at this like a bug to be fixed. But it's actually a feature. If you're not a (would be) worker, and most people aren't (let alone the groups our political system empowers) then the harder those workers work and the less they're paid and the more they're afraid they'll lose their jobs the better!

50 years of rising income taxes, higher student fees, reduced job security, union decline, reduced services for working people etc etc etc are the other side of the coin to rising asset prices and ever higher subsidies for land owners.

Re: Long-term stress is the default mode of the 21st century

#53

Post by dmarchand90 » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 9:05 PM UTC

dmarchand90 wrote: post #40

thanatos519 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up under the threat of nuclear armageddon, which was a super-scary binary willtheydropthebombornot one day end of the world. The difference for me is that catastrophic system collapse due to carbon-emission-driven global heating is in progress, unstoppable, and something that will happen over a much longer period of time. (Apparently the threat of nuclear armageddon is as high as it has ever been, too: https:/…

The doomsday clock doesn't mean anything anymore, at least for atomic war. They started including global warming as a metric in where they set the clock so it's much closer than where it would be by nuclear risk alone. For example we're at 100 seconds to midnight, closer than the 2 minutes during the Cuban missile crises, which is total nonsense

I'm a bit surprised by the down votes, it would be nice to have some comments for discussion...

To clarify I'm not saying that climate change isn't a critical thing to address, I'm just saying that the doomsday clock is no longer a measure of how imminent nuclear war as the parent thread mentioned.

Yes I do think it's ridiculous that the doomsday clock is closer to zero now than during the Cuban missile crises. I don't think this is a very controversial statement. Would be very nice to get some comments rather than just downvotes.

Re: Long-term stress is the default mode of the 21st century

#54

Post by madaxe_again » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 7:52 AM UTC

dmarchand90 wrote: post #53

dmarchand90 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The doomsday clock doesn't mean anything anymore, at least for atomic war. They started including global warming as a metric in where they set the clock so it's much closer than where it would be by nuclear risk alone. For example we're at 100 seconds to midnight, closer than the 2 minutes during the Cuban missile crises, which is total nonsense

I'm a bit surprised by the down votes, it would be nice to have some comments for discussion... To clarify I'm not saying that climate change isn't a critical thing to address, I'm just saying that the doomsday clock is no longer a measure of how imminent nuclear war as the parent thread mentioned. Yes I do think it's ridiculous that the doomsday clock is closer to zero now than during the Cuban missile crises. I don…

Well, when it was instituted, Nuclear Armageddon was the existential threat to humanity, and therefore that was the metric they chose. Everything else paled in comparison. They weren’t hugely aware of the threat that things like climate change, or trophic cascades, could present. They were pure hypotheticals.

They didn’t, however, call it the “Nuclear Armageddon” clock, rather the doomsday clock, because the point was tracking that overarching threat to the continuation of the human species.

As we have now recognised that there are other categories of threat which are potentially civilisation-ending, we, in my opinion rightly, include those in the metrics of the probability of doom.

Climate change is like having a slow growing but untreatable cancer. It’s going to get you, unless something unexpected and drastic happens. It may even get you sooner than you expect - right now we are tracking the upper bounds of every model, and the worst case scenarios are consistently getting worse.

So, nay, it no longer tracks the sole threat of nuclear Armageddon, but I think the estimation of how close we are to midnight is pretty accurate.

Re: Long-term stress is the default mode of the 21st century

#55

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 7:55 AM UTC

t0mbstone wrote: post #49

function_seven wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll give it a shot. Useful stress is something you can relieve through action. You study and learn the thing, and pass the test. Or you have that difficult conversation. Once you go through it, you feel a sense of pride and accomplishment (sorry). Useless stress is what you feel when you’ve think you’re going to lose your job, or a loved one is sick, or a brush fire is burning a mile away from your house. It’s out o…

I like this clarification. If you work out for half an hour and then get off the treadmill, you feel great and accomplished. This is a manageable amount of stress. But for comparison, imagine if you have to run on that treadmill day after day after day, only getting off for regimented breaks and the bare minimum amount of rest required, and you are only allowed two weeks of vacation a year and then it's back to the t…

> And if you ever stop running on the treadmill, you lose your house and ability to feed yourself and provide care for your family...

Not to mention: if, in a moment of weakness, you slow down on a treadmill, braking braces on your legs kick in and start giving resistance, making running harder. Thus any kind of slack or mishap becomes a permanent handicap.