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I was just checking on some business courses. Not MBA courses but at a very good community college. And the word "globalization" came up again and again. This is not something that is happening in the future but right now. And I wonder if this is not a source of stress for a lot of people.
In other words, it's not so much that people suffer from poor parenting, chemical imbalances, poor nutrition, interpersonal conflicts, psychological problems from their background and history--though all of those are in play, certainly. But the overarching factor that the whole planet and all of humanity is traversing this enormous sea change.
There are (more than) a couple of books that address this question. The ones I've looked at:
Boy did you manage to forget a big one that should be included in your little poll:
Global environmental degradation.
When you get right down to it, all the other choices and the stress they create are moot if the planet ends up being uninhabitable.
You're right. It's a stretch, but that overriding concern could be included under geopolitics, maybe with some social justice thrown in? I knew my list of issues would be incomplete. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, you can't edit them once the poll is posted.
"Geopolitics" is an interesting word.
Quote:
ge·o·pol·i·tics
[ˌjēōˈpälədiks]
NOUN
politics, especially international relations, as influenced by geographical factors.
"we were entering a new phase of global geopolitics"
I paired it with "business" because those things are related, also. If you subscribe to a collection of the major news outlets (like Forbes, the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, MSNBC, CBSN, Wired), the connections become evident over time.
In other words, it's not so much that people suffer from poor parenting, chemical imbalances, poor nutrition, interpersonal conflicts, psychological problems from their background and history--though all of those are in play, certainly. But the overarching factor that the whole planet and all of humanity is traversing this enormous sea change.
This is a faulty premise.
A person's immediate circumstances will ALWAYS have more immediate and influential impact on their personal health than "globalization."
"We each need to get a felt sense for what we can handle without feeling overwhelmed or traumatize, and weigh the risk of over-exposure with the risk of remaining ignorant. The news media cranks out a dizzying amount of news every day. One part of self-care is to know our boundaries in relation to how much we can expose our psyches to without feeling paralyzed or besieged."
Our entire history consists of most of us living in very small group - villages and settlements of a couple dozen or couple hundred people. It's only in more recent times that most (or much) of the world has had to live with millions of others.
So....my supposition is that "modern industrial life" is the cause of most stress....of both type (there is good and bad stress)...
Any way we put it, 7 or 20 (future) billion people cannot live on the earth in the same way that 10 or 100 million could.
Boy did you manage to forget a big one that should be included in your little poll:
Global environmental degradation.
When you get right down to it, all the other choices and the stress they create are moot if the planet ends up being uninhabitable.
This was even more pronounced in our ancestors as vast changes in climate (the Ice age and more) as well as natural events (Volcanos, etc.) rendered changes which could not be dealt with at all. That's why people got smarter and moved on to different places...and developed the tech to allow them to do so.
Environmental change is certainly nothing new to the formula.
This was even more pronounced in our ancestors as vast changes in climate (the Ice age and more) as well as natural events (Volcanos, etc.) rendered changes which could not be dealt with at all. That's why people got smarter and moved on to different places...and developed the tech to allow them to do so.
Environmental change is certainly nothing new to the formula.
True, but there's a new aspect to environmental change. Instead of merely being the recipient of some environmental bad thing, we now create it. There's the knowledge that our actions/politics/self-motivations have increased in scale to the point that they threaten the system we depend on for survival. Most humans sit watching doom approach but refuse to swallow the personal sacrificial cost to do anything about it. Just like any other of those listed stresses, some people feel it more acutely than others. There are those who worry about water shortages while there is still water. Then there are those who only worry about it when it no longer flows out of the tap.
There's something called free-floating anxiety, buried in the subconscious and not in the awareness, where other attributes are credited with being the source of upset. Could you say we repress it? If humanity is splintering between the factions of the educated elite and the uneducated, which is proposed by some, the fearfulness has a basis in reality. I don't want humanity to be divided in that way, and profoundly hope it won't.
Geopolitical issues might include worries about all kinds of things: the rising oceans, the aberrent weather, the movement of populations. I have young, 30-something Chinese academics whose children I teach, who say they don't want to live in China any more because it has changed so much since they were young.
Everything is probably going to turn out just fine--if you believe the new Star Trek movies--but it is certainly stressful.
It's a huge cause of cultural and economic stress. The economic stress is fairly straightforward. These days, we have to live among people "not like us." That causes a good amount of stress.
It's a huge cause of cultural and economic stress. The economic stress is fairly straightforward. These days, we have to live among people "not like us." That causes a good amount of stress.
I find some comfort in the recognition that human life has *always* been stressful, ever since our early antecedents climbed down out of the trees in Africa. An analogy has been drawn between the stressors of those early primates and the modern man, walking down in the streets in a big city. Lots of danger, fearful events, possibilities of both good and ill.
Some people really do postulate this horrific future where the divide between the haves and the have-nots is very wide. The living conditions of the poor versus the elite very different. This needs to be countered.
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