I guess you and I and are dads are about the same age and I’ll bet money my High School was worse than yours. No offense, but we didn’t invent anything new in our generation. Teen-aged girls have been getting pregnant for quite some time. I’m pretty sure the rate of teen-age pregnancies has gone down over the centuries. If you didn’t have a couple kids by the age of 16 in the 1300’s you weren’t worth the hovel you lived in.

Stress is not knowing how you are going to eat tomorrow. Stress is not knowing what the infection you have is, or how to cure it. I don’t care how stressful your school seemed, I guarantee you the life expectancy and morbidity rate of every kid who attended it is way higher than kids who lived in the same geographic area 100 years earlier. How many women died in childbirth in your community? It was extremely common up until the 20th century.

Have you ever talked to someone who went to a school 180 degrees different than yours? A kid whose dad had a great job, the family had a huge house, took awesome vacations… Most of those folks will bitch and moan about how stressful their lives were, and are; they worry about getting invited to parties, wearing the right clothes, the car they got when they were 16 wasn’t as cool as the car their buddy got. Our simian brains are hard-wired to find stress and those of us who don’t figure that out get caught up in it. Easily 90+% of the people who have ever walked this planet would trade places with you to have the conditions and opportunities you had in the ’80’s. There was peniccilin so you didn’t die when you got a cut that got infected, or when you got the measles. There was heat and air-conditioning. You had shelter. You had food. You had a magic box that bought the best entertainment from around the world right into your carpeted, heated, air-conditioned living room. You had a magic box that kept food cold and you had a magic box to heat the food. You didn’t spend 90% of your waking hours trying to find something to kill and eat. Think about a king living in the 1400’s. He lived in cold and damp conditions, when he had a headache, toothache or stomachache he got no relief. He might even have some “physicians” give him a blood-letting that left him worse off. His food didn’t have M.S.G. on it. With his fastest coach and horse team he could maybe travel about 10 miles in an hour, and that was a bumpy ride! His kidneys and butt would have been plenty sore when he got wherever he was going. It took him days and weeks to learn of news transpiring less than a few hundred miles away. He knew almost nothing about the world beyond a few hundred mile radius.

We all have stressful things happen to us. If we choose we can all focus on that, feel sorry for ourselves and wallow in the stress. Yet, in modern America it is literally true that most of the stress we have in our lives is completely self-inflicted. We bring it on ourselves. We live in a society where people pay to rent storage containers to store the possessions they own that no longer fit in their homes. It’s been one of the fastest growing businesses of the past two decades.

Read some history, my Man! You had it made in the ’80’s and you’ve got it made now. The problem with your life in the ’80’s vs. your dad’s is things got a lot more convenient and easy. People talk about all the problems we have with credit. The reason more of us have credit card debt than in your folks’ generation is there were no credit cards when your parents were young. You literally could not get a home mortgage with less than 25% down until the late 1980’s, so how could anyone in the ’50’s get “upside down” on their mortgage. There were no home equity lines of credit. If there were would the same percentage of people bite off more than they can chew? Sure.

Most all of us living in modern America make the stress we bear. Your folks didn’t have as many TV sets as you do. They didn’t own a microwave, a DVR or video recorder, cam-corders, electric guitars, and on and on… Confuscius said, “He who owns little is little owned.” That’s good advice most of us could learn from. Stress, real stress, is not having options. We have more options and choices than any humans who have ever lived. If we don’t choose wisely we can end up living very stressful lives, but it’s still much better to live in a world with too many options, than too few.

I heard a study talked about on the radio (so my facts are shaky, but hey, that’s never stopped me before) that the top factors in the behavior of teens were:

boredom
money (too much or too little, although the study claimed too much was actually worse)
responsibility
amount of free time (again, too much or too little are both bad things. Too much and they are bored, too little and they have no time for consideration of actions)

It happens to coincide with my personal belief that we have it completely backwards as a society. We believe that giving a “child” the responsibility of helping keep a home and family going is mean, that having them contribute to society is taking away their childhood, and that they have a right to sleep in and play video games now because they will have to work the rest of their lives. However, we do make them responsible for having the knowledge of sex and violence on an unprecedented level. I believe it’s an incredible injustice to make them responsible for adult knowledge (although some of what they know I don’t, and don’t need to) and yet treat them as children. Very confusing at least.

So I guess I agree with both of you and that it’s a dangerous combination to have life be easier physically and so much complicated emotionally.

@ Rufus: Speaking as a guy who grew up in the 80s, with a dad who grew up in the 50s, he was utterly bewildered as to how complex and stressful my life was as a teen. It was only a generation later, but it was like I was growing up in a completely different country than him. Just because things look easy from the outside doesn’t mean they are. I mean, when you were a kid in high school, did you have to contend with kids pulling guns on you between class? I did. Riots in your school? Been there, done that. Drugs? Rape on school grounds? Abortion? Devil Worship? Suicide? These were all fairly commonplace things in the high school I went to, and my school was regarded as something of a countryclub at the time, compared to the older schools all around us. Lemme tell ya, if you’re 14 and someone pulls a gun on you, it’s pretty damn stressful. And it doesn’t really get better the second time you do it. But you learn to keep your head down, and you just keep going to school in the warzone regardless of how awful it is because there isn’t an alternative. And if it was that bad 25 years ago, I can only imagine it’s vastly, vastly worse today. The stories I hear from my teacher friends certainly make it work that way.

I think what we have is a branding issue. Back in the 60s we allowed worthless bums, drug addicts, and hippies to be rebranded as “counter culture revolutionaries” and today we have a culture that paints slackers and other worthless layabouts as quirky, fun people rather than ticks on the fun bag of society. It’s not necessarily rooting for the bad boy as much as it is trying to convince ourselves there is no such thing as a bad boy, everyone is just misunderstood or unfortunate now. We’ve become intellectually dishonest with ourselves and that has become an incubator for idiotic moral relativism which we in our endless quest to rebrand everything now call being “a progressive”.