Stress-tastic: The Art of Worrying Well

The human capacity for stress is boundless. Give us a problem, and we'll worry. Take the problem away, and we'll find something else. Stress is such a stressful topic amongst the chatterati. To assess the quality of challenges in a given society, look at what the local newspaper in the city is fretting over. 

I visited a country last month where food allergens and bullying at school were among the most stressful issues for the community. The local newspaper reported food mislabeling as one of the gravest crises of the century. The locals were stricken with grief when they heard about employees back in my country working nine hours a day! They claimed to have empathy burnout by merely hearing the story! A Child getting bullied at school can cause deep distress in this community. As a child, I remember getting thrashed at the playground. I come back home with a deep gash in my hand. My grandmother glanced at it and suddenly remembered that she urgently needed a half-liter of milk. I was promptly dispatched to the nearby store! 


As the world improves, our threshold for complaining drops. With all existential problems solved, people swipe their stress to smaller ones. Without serious hurdles, our resilience to face life's grave challenges weakens!

 The human gaze must always scroll towards the next anxiety. Stress is central to our being. Nevertheless, the quality of the stress determines how we cope. The more mundane the worries, the more terrible our coping mechanisms.  

Imagine a fictional society with unlimited wealth, health, and permanent peace. Would it be stress-free? Certainly not. Its defining characteristic would be how trivial and absurd its grievances would be. It would be stressed about the declining selfie etiquette, enraged about the distressing trend of wearing socks with sandals, and traumatized about using too many emojis in a single text message 

This month, India had a four-day intense war with a neighbor. If you had landed in the country the week after, you would have missed the anxiety and the nerve-wracking moments. If you didn't know what Sindoor meant, you would have thought India flattened Pakistan in a cricket match held at the Nur Ali Khan grounds, and Sindoor was smeared on the winners. The headline effortlessly moved to the Sensex rebound, and analysts predicted defense stocks' prospects! Company executives scrambled to mitigate the business fallout, applying their own 'sindoor' solution. Is this resilience? Who knows. But we at least stress better!

  

There once was a society fine,

Whose worries were truly divine,

They'd fret, and they'd stress,

Over issues quite less,

And their anxieties knew no decline.

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