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Never before in my 37-year career (so far) have I been as stressed as I am these days. This is a problem because stress is uncomfortable, stress is very bad for your health, and stress makes you stupid. And if I interpret the various signals around me correctly, I am not the only one who is stressed. Whenever I ask a colleague how they are doing, they invariably answer: Stressed!
Q: Why all of this stress?
A: To paraphrase a few famous lines from British sitcom Fawlty Towers:
Mr. O’Reilly: Dear Mr. Fawlty, if the Good Lord had meant us to be stressed, he’d have given us things to be stressed about.
Basil Fawlty: He has! The economy! It can kill a man at ten paces with one blow of its tongue!
Stress is your body’s natural response to physical, mental, or emotional demands or pressures. When faced with a situation that requires heightened attention or fast responses, your body releases hormones that change your physiology to make all of that possible. In limited amounts, stress is great! Without stress, our ancestors would not have survived the dangers of prehistoric life. Even in today’s post-historic world, stress is often required to ensure that we can deal with everything that life throws at us. Without stress, we’d be very laid back, and most likely, very dead.
Our bodies have evolved for short periods of stress followed by relatively long periods of leisure. However, the ever increasing pace of modern life has increased the frequency of stressful events to the point that many people are running from one stressful situation to the next without any intermediate recovery.
Why am I so stressed?
Well, first of all there is the human condition, which inevitably comes with some stress. Even without the trappings of modern (work) life, there are illness, death, accidents, crime, family trouble, and random misfortunes to deal with. I used to have a lot of stress of that nature when I got divorced, when the woman I divorced for broke up with me, when my mother died, and when some big plans I had made kept unraveling. This all unhelpfully happened at more or less the same time, which resulted in the stress compounding into a full-blown burnout that required months of recovery.
I don’t have a lot of that sort of stress these days. My parents are long dead and buried, my daughter has grown into a very responsible adult, and me and Mrs. Wednesday Wisdom survived the seven year itch and so we are in it for the long haul. On the personal front, most, if not everything, is going very well. Obviously, I am not entirely free of personal stress. There are some expensive renovations being done to the family home back in Europe, which requires me to keep control of builders and architects nine timezones away and in a foreign language, my brother regularly annoys me with some dumb plan he wants to execute on for which he does not have the money, and my best friend’s husband woke up blind one morning and now is seriously considering euthanasia. The human condition, as I wrote above, inevitably comes with stress, but all things considered, I can deal with the personal stress.
So if most of my stress is not personal, what is it related to? Is it, … professional?
Answer: Yes (of course)!
For the first time in my career I find myself in a situation where I am constantly scared about losing my job. For whatever reason, we have entered a world where good people regularly lose their jobs through no immediate fault of their own. Companies with billions in the bank are cutting costs left and right and for the first time in history, highly paid information technologists are in the crosshairs as well. You can be let go because you had a bad quarter; you can be let go because the company is moving out of an entire segment of the market; you can be let go because you were in the “wrong” project, even if you did decent work there. By now, I know many people who were laid off and I am still somewhat shocked about how indiscriminate some of these lay-offs were.
Many people that I know (from personal experience) to be very good have been let go. A friend of mine was let go a mere two weeks after having received a good performance review. Another friend was let go because, in essence, he became ill. The times are clearly insane. According to TrueUp.IO, in the year 2025 so far there have been 668 layoffs at tech companies with 206,611 people impacted. This came on top of 2024 with a grand total of 1,115 layoffs and 239,101 people impacted. Apparently, nobody is safe…
This workplace insecurity is bad because I need a job to make money and I have a deep (and somewhat irrational) existential fear of being poor.
In the last few decades we have created a winner-takes-most economy that fueled a deep sense that in order to be and do well, you need to rise to the top of the heap. This is obvious in the United Hypercapitalist States, where you can still, despite Obamacare, easily go bankrupt by losing your job and becoming ill. And, since the US seems to be a trendsetter for the rest of the (western) world, Europe and other places seem to be trending in that direction as well.
People today are infinitely better off than a few generations ago, but by raising the prospects of what is possible, we also raised the bar of what it takes to participate fully in society. Not too long ago, say during my childhood, life was much simpler, but at the same time everyone was decidedly less affluent.
Given the rise of nostalgic populist movements I’d say it is fair to assume that people want that simplicity back, but without giving up the associated affluence. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be possible.
Using ever more advanced technology, we created massive amounts of wealth, but distributed a lot of that wealth upwards to a highly educated and, to a large extent, technological elite. In the US of 1992, the top 10% had about 16x more wealth than the bottom 50%. At the start of 2024, that ratio had gone up to over 26x (source). Combine that with stark increases in the cost of essentials like housing, healthcare, and education, and it becomes obvious that the premium on being in the top 10% is higher than ever before. Cue an unhealthy amount of pressure to get and keep the “right” job.
As I wrote before: When I graduated from college in 1988 I was looking forward to a comfortable upper middle class existence. The enormous rise of technology, and especially of the network economy, has made it possible for people like me to become very well off, much better off in fact than I had any hope of ever being able to achieve. All it takes to rise to the top of the income distribution graph is getting and keeping a few of the right jobs with the right companies in the right phase of their lifecycle, and presto! FIRE here we come!
Thus we created a rat race: Scores of people chasing after or trying to keep a (relatively speaking) handful of jobs in a (again: relatively speaking) small number of companies that might get them financial independence or maybe even generational wealth. Actually, reading the Wikipedia entry for“rat race” again I am not quite sure it is an appropriate term, because apparently a true “rat race” is a self-defeating or pointless pursuit. Our current rat race might be self-defeating, but it is definitely not pointless. The prize is real and we all know a few winners.
One of the problems with knowing winners is that you might start feeling like a loser. I am approaching 60 and not retired yet, which definitely makes me feel like an idiot. The consequence? Stress, as I and many others with me are trying to make our pile of money, while money as we know it is still worth something…
So here we are: Everyone is stressed. The people who have jobs are stressed about their ability to keep it. The people who do not have jobs are stressed about getting one. Everyone is stressed about making enough money to get into or stay in the upper reaches of the income distribution curve. The modern economy gave us smartphones, streaming services, and driverless taxis. But what all our increased wealth did not buy us is peace of mind and an easier life.
The rat race is real, but remember this: Even if you are winning that race, you are still one stressed rat!
