The Era Of Stress, Part 1

Question: Stress, tension, and psychological pressure have all become ordinary phenomena that every person experiences. Our era is even called the era of stress. Modern existence puts a person under chronic daily stress, making stress a constant rather than a periodic occurrence.

It is also known that prolonged stress is the cause of all most common illnesses: heart disease, diabetes, strokes, depression, etc. What explains this frightening phenomenon that we are living with today?

Answer: A person is a desire to receive pleasure and if he receives pleasure, he is calm. This is also seen in animals. But, from generation to generation, a person’s desire for pleasure constantly grows so he always requires ever increasing pleasure or fulfillment for his desire.

And because everyone wants to receive ever increasing pleasure, we find that we have to share with others, therefore, there is nothing in life from which we can just receive fulfillment. With each generation, life becomes increasingly more stressful.

And now stress is becoming increasingly more specific; the evidence is the increase in the incidence of heart attacks and depression, the rise in the use of narcotics and antidepressants by every group, including household pets.

We are all under constant stress, which increases the probability of heart disease and other illnesses. Not all diseases appear to be a direct result of stress, but in reality, stress is the main cause. There is no disease in the body that is not the effect of stress: skin disease, diseases of the inner organs, mainly, the heart and lungs.

Stress accompanies us from the moment we are released from our mother’s arms and it does not leave us until the end of our lives. As children we are required to go to kindergarten where we are immediately placed under stress because we don’t want to be there. Before, children were raised at home by their mothers and grandmothers, and later took on the profession of their fathers and continued their craft. A person didn’t leave his circle.

Today, he is obligated to travel somewhere, run, fly, search, where to receive a profession and fulfillment for his life. His egoism grows. He receives information from the Internet, from others, and doesn’t want to be less successful than the rest. Therefore he is under constant pressure. The result of all this is that we live under constant stress.

In addition, a person works 24 hours a day. We could ask, why should he work so much? But, the elite want to earn more money and drag us into all kinds of competitions. The husband and the wife work, while the poor children are abandoned in a kindergarten or at school from early morning, where they too are under stress. If you talk to children, you would be amazed at the kind of psychological pressure they are under.

You can’t take a small child from the mother. A child, by his very nature, needs to grow up within the family or some kind of a wider environment that he accepts as his own family. As soon as he is taken from home and placed in a kindergarten, he immediately finds himself in a stressful state because he doesn’t feel safe there.

A child wants to be the same as everyone else, that is the most soothing state. It is not pride, but merely a lack of confidence, that makes him want to hide himself among others. After he moves through this first stage and becomes like everyone else, i.e., the society accepts him, then the ego pushes him to want to stand out from the rest. He starts to make a constant calculation between safety and aspiration for power, pride, and can even step outside his comfort zone or put himself in danger to a particular degree.

But the search for a maximal safe state or the desire to stand out both put us under very heavy stress, and this is where our entire life happens. If we live in a society that is completely controlled by egoism, then we cannot hide from stress and we are only left with antidepressants and narcotics. This is what we are seeing in today’s society.
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” 7/27/17