Anyone moved to complain about the times we live in is likely to meet with a common response: that, in historical terms, right now is the best possible time to be alive.
The optimists will often point to the many modern conveniences we enjoy – like air-travel, Wi-Fi and antibiotics – and conclude that humans have never had it so good. Even our greatest contemporary ills (like the Covid pandemic) pale in insignificance when compared with those faced by our ancestors (like Spanish Flu or the Black Death). To borrow a phrase from Thomas Hobbes, life in the past was often “nasty, brutish and short”; we should be grateful to be living through the present.
Yet in one respect, humans today face a greater challenge than was seen in almost any previous era: that of maintaining our mental wellbeing. Though we might be physically and materially better off than ever before, arguably we have never been under so much psychological pressure. Here, we explore six aspects of modern life that may be affecting your mental wellbeing – and how you can regain calm and wisdom.
Work/life balance
One of the most pernicious ideas of modern times is that of work/life balance. In an age when the historic division between ‘breadwinners’ and ‘homemakers’ has broken down, it is possible – even easy – to have both a successful career and a successful home life. Yet this is a fallacy: one ensured by our modern conceptions of what ‘success’ means in both contexts. In the business world, where competition, tight deadlines and constant communication are the norm, we must be prepared to work punishingly long hours to scale the heights of the ladder. At the same time, we have massively raised our expectations of what marriage and parenting consist of: our partners and children must have all our time, attention and affection if they are to remain healthy and content.
The solution is to surrender the expectation of achieving a work/life balance. This isn’t to say that homemakers can’t hold down jobs, or that professionals should give up on household chores. It’s to accept that those who choose to focus on their careers will almost certainly have deficiencies as partners and parents, while those who orient themselves around family shouldn’t castigate themselves for failing to become CEOs. We need to make peace with whatever imbalance we choose to strike.
Consumerism
We have become a consumer society. In the past, the route to happiness ran through immaterial concepts: through loving God, serving a master or performing our role in a rigid social hierarchy. In contrast, our secular, capitalist society promises a single remedy for all our ills: shopping. The things we buy aren’t simply meant to perform a function: they have the power to make us happy. The solution to our misery is simply a question of what brand of car or laundry detergent we should purchase.
The issue isn’t so much with the idea of materialism per se. It has much more to do with our illiteracy around our own emotional needs. The modern world teaches us next to nothing about what we, ourselves, actually need to be happy. A better route lies in self-knowledge: thoroughly examining our thoughts, memories and feelings for clues as to what our lives are missing.
Modern love
For most of human history, our romantic choices were largely made for us. Our social position and connections decided who we would end up with. But in the modern age, we are pretty much free to choose whoever we like. Our criteria for these decisions is based on an idea that emerged at the very dawn of the modern age: romanticism. We are meant to ‘follow our instincts’: choosing partners entirely on the basis of how they make us feel.
The problem with our instincts is that they are not always a reliable guide to what we actually need from a partner. They were formed very early on, in childhood – conditioning us to replicate the kind of love we receive as children in adulthood. They can lead us to select highly inappropriate people on the basis that they treat us in the same (often problematic) ways our parents did. At the same time, they condition us to reject more suitable candidates for failing to anticipate our needs as assiduously as mothers or fathers. Stable relationships aren’t based on instinct, but on compromise: the ability of two people to live with, and compensate for, each others’ trickier sides.
Busy-ness
It is no surprise that our society is ‘busier’ than the last. One of the hallmarks of the modern age has been the rise of productivity. In historical terms, we make more things much faster than ever before. This trend has led to our making a virtue of activity for activity’s sake. In the modern view, unless we are constantly, ceaselessly ‘busy’, we must be wasting time.
This notion isn’t only making us unmanageably tired and stressed, it’s preventing us from seeing the very real benefits inactivity can offer. Moments of supposed ‘laziness’ – relaxing in a bath, or staring out of a window – are often when our minds are at their most productive. To become more efficient (and less stressed), we need to give ourselves permission to be lazy.
Meritocracy
In the modern world, one’s value is no longer determined by the place where one was born, or the class one belongs to. Instead, value is based on merit alone. It is our achievements that make us who we are.
The problem with this attractive-sounding idea is that it massively raises the spectre of failure. The pre-modern world didn’t see moments of failure (which might be the result of a capricious God or fate) as a guide to one’s worth as a person. Yet in a fully meritocratic world, success and failure are not accidents, but indicators of genuine value. To recover from setbacks, we should stop judging others – or ourselves – as either ‘successes’ or ‘failures’, since everyone is a mixture of both.
Progress
Perhaps the defining idea of the modern age is our belief in progress. Whereas the societies of the past emphasised tradition and continuity, we see progress (whether technological or moral) as both a necessary and desirable fact of life. Yet, taken to its logical extremes, the notion of progress presupposes the idea of perfection: an ideal end state towards which humanity is headed.
This cult of perfectionism is a modern phenomenon. In the past, religions like Christianity and Buddhism stressed the idea of man’s essential frailty. We would do well to rehabilitate such notions. Perfection is impossible since all humans are, by definition, flawed and imperfect. We should abandon the cult of perfectionism and fashion a cult of imperfectionism in its place.
The School of Life is a global organisation helping people to lead more fulfilling lives. Its latest book, How to Survive the Modern World, is available from Telegraph Books for £20. To order, visit books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514
