Are We Really On The Best Path ?
It seems to my untrained eye, that people now, especially the young people, the very ones surrounded by all the new technology that is supposed to make life easier, are totally stressed out. When I was 20, the only stress in my life was, "will I find Mr Right?" Sounds silly now but it was a stress for me, a concern, more than a stress. I knew Mr Right would be the one to protect me, take care of me, love me, help me, and provide me with a life that was a little bit of heaven on earth, and he has. But now, there are so many demands on the young people to get high paying jobs, be better than everyone else at their job, watch out for cut-throat competition, and have the newest gadgets, along with starting off married life by having it all. New furniture, nice house, new car etc. We did not have that kind of mentality 30 years ago. Half the people we knew had furniture they got from their family or a neighbor. No one was in debt, no one had credit to start out with. We all drove used cars, we all swapped baby clothes when our little ones started to arrive. No one expected to have a lot in the beginning, at least no one we knew.
The peer pressure now for young adults and it seems older adults too, is pressing people to buy things, do things that are well beyond their actual means.
We have friends taking vacations that set them back 6 months after they come home. The bills that arrive from this trip after they come back are eating them alive and removing many of the memories of the trip.
So, if this modern life with all the fancy stoves and counter tops worth the stress they bring from having to pay so much for them ? Is that new house worth the stress it brings ? Is that fancy car worth payments that eat up your peace of mind, worth it ?
Is working for a huge paycheck worth it, if you can't sleep at night ?
I did some checking and it looks like my untrained eye, is right on. The research tells the story I see going on.
We may need to just take a step back in time and not expect so much right off the bat. We might want to learn to be content with less, so that we actually have more of a life, that is free from our man made pressures.
Life is not about how many toys we own, its about living.
"Twenge, who led the study, and researchers at five other universities analyzed the responses of 77,576 high school and college students to the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (or the MMPI) between 1938 and 2007 and found the number of those reporting mental health problems has steadily increased over the past 70 years. All-time highs have been reached during the 2000’s."
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