Blog: No wonder we're all so stressed (From Chorley Citizen)
When news happens, text CIT and your photos and videos to 80360. Or contact us by email or phone.
Blog: No wonder we're all so stressed
2:03pm Monday 18th February 2013 in Helen Mead
By Helen Mead, Lancashire Telegraph columnist
Life was so much simpler in the old days, for example: The other night, my daughters fancied a take-away.
Chinese, Indian, Italian or McDonald’s? After much debate they settled on Greek (my youngest was desperate to try a kebab).
When I was growing up it was fish and chips and that was it.
I was in my teens when a Chinese take-away appeared in the local town. We were all intrigued but no-one was in a rush to go there.
We had to be broken in gently in our corner of the world.
The longwinded process of deciding got me thinking about how much more straightforward things were back then – I can think of of many more examples.
Shopping: We had a small supermarket in town. It was years before Spar appeared and, later still, Asda a few miles away.
The local shop closed at about 6pm, so if you didn’t get your milk or bread you had to wait until morning. And, like every other shop, it was shut on Sunday.
When Spar opened with a 10pm closing time we thought it really radical. It was open on Sundays too, which was shocking. I’m not religious, but I remember feeling strangely guilty the first time I shopped on a Sunday, and I still think it’s weird that you can pop to a supermarket at 2am.
Now she’s got a job and a bank account, my eldest daughter has just started internet shopping for clothes, surfing sites for hours – it’s all a far cry from my life with the occasional trip to Chelsea Girl and odd purchase from my mum’s catalogue.
Television: It is incredible to think that when I was born there were just two channels. I was about to start school when BBC2 was launched, making decisions over what to watch far harder.
BBC1, BBC2 or ITV, what a dilemma!
In those days it was common for people to turn their noses up at ITV, which they saw as commercial and tacky, and snub it altogether. The only time my Auntie Kathleen watched ITV was at our house at Christmas.
Now look at all the channels – hundreds, and yet only a handful are watchable.
Communications: When I was a child and we were having tea my dad used to huff and puff every time the phone rang, and with three children it went off regularly.
How would he deal with the present scenario? I’ve even wrestled my daughter’s mobile from her grasp as she rudely texts while I’m talking to her. And, with Facebook, Twitter and e-mail, that’s the tip of the iceberg.
Everything is so complicated, no wonder we are all stressed.
Comments(7)
Ken Shuffles
says...
3:20pm Mon 18 Feb 13
Kevin, Colne
says...
7:01pm Mon 18 Feb 13
One should be careful here. I’m fairly certain that 30 years ago there were people bemoaning the speed of things and stresses, even then.
There is no doubt, however, that we’ve continued to lose the plot with a great many people feeling like hamsters on the wheel and completely ragged, while others have nothing to do.
My recollection of my youth is one where there were some fairly simple maxims. I don’t recall sweating much over exam grades. We were given a simple steer: try your very best. Another maxim was: never do anything that you’d feel ashamed to see on the front page of the weekly local newspaper. Trite and quaint? Perhaps; but still pretty good bearings for the compass.
I have to say in all honesty to you that I fear that hyper-consumerism is a dead-end street. I hold the view that we are fed a lot of nonsense by the political class and the mainstream media, and modern technology means that this has not only multiplied but there is no escaping from its tentacles. Spending makes you poor; not happy.
Do you know what I find really alarming and sad? It’s this: unlike Eastern societies here in the West there seems no attempt to distil wisdom and pass that on to the next generation.
It’s as though we’ve given-up on our children and are prepared to see them groomed into a form of modern-day slavery as eager, docile consumers. That’s very sad and rather depressing.
Kevin
Ken Shuffles
says...
11:42am Thu 21 Feb 13
When in Rome or in Colne, NOBODY has to be murdered or die for anyone elses sins.
Ken Shuffles
says...
11:50am Thu 21 Feb 13
Ken Shuffles
says...
2:43pm Thu 21 Feb 13
All our mental and emotional logic and all the popular causes of media corporations, religions, creeds, formulas, multiple choice highways or all our social platforms put together still, cannot create an eternal feeling of love anywhere in the natural or virtual space between the first day of birth and the last moment of the last day.
Ken Shuffles
says...
2:45pm Thu 21 Feb 13
Ken Shuffles says...
3:17pm Mon 18 Feb 13
Cobbling together a lot of drunken information at 3 am after the clubs close is actually becoming easier to do than communicating with a real person, partner, and family members than it is at any time during normal office hours and these days, anyone would be forgiven for thinking real feelings expressed by real people in the real world was just something people did before choices were invented.
Now we have a multiple, twenty-four- hour-seven nights a week surplus of choices we can make, it's easy to forget that just one simple moment of real feeling is what we are looking for.