A HARSH WORLD

by David Trammel

“Did the sky turn green?”

Where I live in the United States, the Midwest city of Saint Louis, we get storms. They come in off the Plain states to our West. Sometimes they are small, sometimes large. Sometimes gentle showers, sometimes howling wind and rain. Never the same storm twice though. That variety is something I love about my home.

Sometimes though, when you are outside making sure everything is picked up or tied down, you will feel a sudden chill. Then a silence whispers to you, “It’s coming”.

“Did the sky turn green?”

If it is late afternoon and the storm clouds particularly tall, the combination of Sun’s angle, high altitude ice crystals and the way that rain drops filter the setting sunlight give the clouds a particular shade of green. Not the good green or healthy plants and fresh mowed lawns.

No, this is an unnatural shade, one that makes you uneasy and worried. It hints at hale, high winds and sometimes tornadoes. It is a green that speaks of danger and possible loss. It hints at damage and destruction. It makes you feel uneasy.

“Did the sky turn green for you today?”

More and more people today are uneasy. And it’s not because of the weather.

They carry a sense of stress that never seems to leave and if asked, difficult to explain. Its not panic, and its not despair. It is quieter than that and leaves us wondering. Am I imagining it?

Is it the World, or is it me?

Its a low-grade tension that forces on us a sense of danger that lingers even during moments which should feel restful. Your daily life feels unstable, even when you do everything the people supposedly in charge tell you to do.

People go to work and meet their responsibilities. They put in the effort to have relationships even when they lack the time. Each of us tries to stuff everything we are expected to do, into a smaller and smaller paper bag of our time. Nothing appears broken. Yet beneath that surface, something always feels off. A sense of waiting, without knowing what you wait for. A wariness without a clearly defined threat.

Too often now, this stress is brushed off as a personal problem. A failure to cope.

People have come to believe that if they were just a little more disciplined, more understanding of the way the World ‘really works’, everything would be better. When it doesn’t, it just proves what they have been told by all the so called ‘experts’. Its not the system, they are told over and over on their social media. It is they, themselves who are to blame for their troubles and lack of success.

—

This essay will argue that this explanation misses something fundamental. You still have agency, even when everyone around you tells you, you don’t.

You need to understand, the stress people feel today is not the result of any individual weakness nor of poor adjustment. It is the result of living inside environments that no longer handle pressure in predictable ways. The systems shaping daily experience have changed in ways that are easy to feel but difficult to name.

Yes, its time to recognize things are broken.

The parable of the “Frog and a slowly boiling pot” comes to my mind. The frog hasn’t changed, the system it is living in has. What is normal, is now outside of even the worst case scenarios expect in the past. We, like the frog, need to recognize the pot we are in has changed, and take steps to save ourselves.

We will look at two questions in this first essay.

First, why stress has become so persistent even among people who are informed, capable, and functioning. Second, why this moment feels different from earlier periods of uncertainty and anxiety, as though familiar strategies are no longer sufficient.

—

You haven’t yet meet me. We’ll get around to a more detailed introduction as we progress.

Today, what is relevant is that I am old, nearly 70 and have spent most of my Life, like many of you, as a ‘wage earner’. My income is directly tied into the skills I have learned and what I can do for someone else that they will pay me for. Blue collar is the term most will recognize. My sweat, others money. Their company’s success built on my back.

Something I have noticed over that long life. The divide between the Haves and Have Nots has only gotten bigger. What once was a wide street of opportunity for those brave enough to cross it, has become a looming canyon of exclusion.

Gone are the days of employee training and supervisor mentorship. Gone are the days you could walk in off the street and get a job. Now, if you don’t have a Master’s degree and 20 years of experience, your resume doesn’t even make it out of the pile of all the others they won’t look at.

I can remember when I got my first ‘real’ job. Well, real job back in my beginnings meant something much different than it does today. A real job back then meant, ‘did it have a pension?’, or ‘did you get health insurance?’ It meant stability.

It also meant, a social contract of sorts. Management and the people in power understood that their prosperity, rested on your prosperity. Employers recognized that for their companies to succeed, meant that those same companies needed to give you the training and the tools to do your job better.

When was the last time you got meaningful training from a new employer?

You have become just another tool to use until it’s no longer useful, then discarded. Yet, to do that, the people benefiting from that new attitude of disposability, needed to convince you of something more toxic. They had to convince you that whenever the system worked against you, it wasn’t by design. That your failure was your fault.

That framing certainly serves someone, just not you.

—

Have you ever noticed, when ever the propaganda news media looses narrative control, you see articles highlighting how this person or that person has succeeded. Not just succeeded but done so in a huge and spectacular way too. The headlines will loudly proclaim “He transformed his little startup into a one hundred million dollar business!”

The underlying message is as simple as it is insidious.

“They did it, why can’t you?”

Modern business culture has convinced people to interpret failure as a personal shortcoming.

Our new world is a place of opportunity and abundance, and if you aren’t succeeding then you just aren’t trying hard enough.

We are taught that capable people cope and that informed people adapt. We are now told over and over, that any sort of stability and agency you have is primarily because of the society around us. Because our economic betters are looking out for us.

They use their control of the media and the message to hearken back to a time when things seemed simpler. When television shows like “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” feed us stability and compliance. When yes, you could have the ‘American Dream’ with a single income.

Nostalgia has a way of papering over the dark and nasty. The Fifties and Sixties were not pleasant for many, something those of you out there, yearning for an idyllic past you can retreat to need to remember. It did though, still have some degree of ‘shame’ when people in power stepped past the unofficial line. If a bank president stole money from his institution, they more than likely went to jail.

Accountability for the people at the top still meant something then.

—

The reflex to blame ourselves is understandable when everyone else is pointing their finger at us. We all do it. Now though, that very human habit of self reflection has been hijacked. Seeing a situation of gross imbalance no longer means looking at all sides in a fair and balanced manner. Instead we have been taught to first immediately look in how WE have failed.

This acceptance of fault is a product of the very levers of power and control we live in now. The levers that have been built by those who seek to keep all the benefits to themselves, while pushing any costs onto others.

Those ‘others’ includes you.

Beyond understanding that the problems don’t start with you, people need to recognize that much of the stress you experience today does not originate from a single crisis or hardship. It emerges from accumulation. A slow steady drip, drip, drip.

Economic uncertainty layered onto institutional instability. Information saturation layered onto social fragmentation. Each pressure, each failure, taken alone might be manageable. Together, they create conditions in which tension rarely resolves before the next demand arrives.

Historically, stress tended to arrive in waves.

Periods of disruption were followed by periods of recovery. Even when outcomes were uncertain, endpoints existed. The present moment differs not because stress is new, but because it has become continuous. Crises overlap rather than conclude. Systems shift without settling. Narratives change faster than individuals can integrate them.

The human nervous system did not evolve for permanent readiness. It is well suited to episodic threat, followed by recovery. The saber tooth tiger might eat your friend, but it rarely came back day after day after day, eating another one.

When vigilance becomes constant, it no longer sharpens performance. It erodes it. Attention fragments. Patience thins. Emotional bandwidth narrows. This is not a failure of character. It is a mismatch between human limits and environmental demands.

Awareness intensifies this effect. You would think that always keeping that tiger in mind would sharpen your focus. Unfortunately for most of us, that isn’t how it works.

In the past, a looming threat meant people banded together and dealt with it. When threats are personal, we do something about them.

Being informed now though means recognizing risks without having meaningful agency over them. News, data, expert commentary, and constant updates expand understanding while shrinking a sense of control. People know more than ever, yet feel less able to influence outcomes that affect their lives.

The result is what academics call a distinctive cognitive load. The mind remains partially engaged at all times, scanning, evaluating, and preparing. Even during rest, attention does not fully disengage. Many people are not exhausted because they are doing too much, but because they are never fully off.

When stress is interpreted as a personal flaw, the natural response is to try harder. Optimize routines. Consume more information. Search for better tactics. Within an individual-responsibility framework, this makes sense. But increased effort inside unchanged conditions produces diminishing returns. Frustration grows. Shame follows.

Feeling stressed in an environment that is genuinely stressful is not weakness. It is feedback.

A further feature of this moment is the erosion of confidence that familiar strategies will continue to work. Many people sense that effort and outcome are becoming disconnected. Actions that once produced reliable results now feel less predictable. Planning feels provisional. Long-term thinking becomes difficult when conditions appear to change faster than plans can mature.

This uncertainty does not always register as fear. More often, it shows up as fatigue. A quiet depletion without a clear cause. Motivation thins. Patience shortens. Hope becomes harder to sustain, even when no single factor can be named.

Again, this is not pathology. It is a rational response to prolonged exposure to unstable systems.

What distinguishes the present moment from earlier periods of anxiety is not just intensity, but structure. Past eras of instability still carried an assumption of eventual resolution. Even when outcomes were unclear, the shape of change felt legible. Today, many people sense that something more fundamental may be shifting.

This raises an uncomfortable question. Are we approaching a tipping point.

In systems theory, tipping points describe thresholds where gradual accumulation gives way to abrupt change. Complex systems often appear stable precisely because they are absorbing stress internally. Buffers compensate. Feedback loops adjust. From the outside, little seems to change. Beneath the surface, adaptive capacity is being consumed.

When that capacity is exhausted, relatively small additional stresses can produce disproportionate effects. The shift feels sudden not because it was unprepared for, but because the preparation was invisible. Warning signs tend to be subtle rather than dramatic. Increased volatility. Slower recovery. Heightened sensitivity to disruptions that once would have been absorbed.

From this perspective, the critical issue is not whether stress exists, but whether the systems producing it are nearing the limits of their ability to compensate.

Are we nearing those limits, or are we already living beyond them?

—

This introduction has not attempted to offer solutions. That choice is deliberate. There has been a huge amount of change over the last hundred years. Sorting through it all is going to take some time.

Before strategies can be evaluated, the nature of the problem must be understood clearly. Causes of stress that are misidentified cannot be addressed effectively. Treating systemic pressure as personal failure directs energy toward self-correction instead of environmental comprehension where it belongs. You add more stress just at the moment when you have the least amount of personal control. It is orientation of blame which has it’s origins outside of yourself.

Understanding, this stress you are feeling today is learned.

What was learned, can be unlearned.

If the stress you feel has been difficult to articulate, that difficulty itself is part of the signal. Systems that generate diffuse, persistent pressure rarely announce themselves cleanly. They operate through accumulation, normalization, and delay.

Recognizing that pattern is not pessimism. It is a prerequisite for agency.

The questions before us are these: Were the strategies we were taught built for the terrain we now inhabit? And are the assumptions about stability we inherited still valid?

These questions, and the ones we will explore in later posts, cannot be answered by trying harder inside outdated assumptions. They require a different way of seeing the systems we have lived within, and a recognition that those systems have changed.

That is where we begin.