This is a big question. To do it justice, we can’t just skim the surface. We need to go on a journey—a deep dive into the murky depths of human history to explore the very nature of what it means to be a stressed-out human. What caused our ancestors to suffer, and what causes us to suffer today? Was it all about avoiding plagues and predators, or were they also lying awake at 3 AM worried they said the wrong thing at a toga party?
Before we fire up the time machine, let’s get on the same page. What even is all this stuff? We often use words like stress, worry, and anxiety interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. It’s helpful to untangle them, drawing on the work of thinkers like Dr. Martin Rossman (The Worry Solution).
- Worry is the cognitive part. It’s the story you tell yourself about what might go wrong in the future. It’s the act of mentally rehearsing catastrophe, of imagining negative outcomes. Crucially, worry isn’t something that just happens to you; it’s something your brain does, often as a subconscious habit it learned because it thinks it’s helping.
- Stress is the physiological response. It’s the flood of adrenaline and cortisol, the pounding heart, the tense muscles. It’s your body’s alarm system screaming, “SOMETHING IS HAPPENING!”
- Anxiety is the emotional reaction. It’s the feeling you get when stress and worry get together—that potent cocktail of dread and physical sensation that makes you want to run and hide.
Our journey is about understanding how the targets of our worry have changed, and how the habit of worry itself has evolved from a useful survival tool into a self-perpetuating cycle.
To make sense of this, let’s invent a simple tool: The Human Misery Spectrum.
On one end of the spectrum, we have Survival Stress.
This is the stress of imminent doom. It’s the feeling of “OH MY GOD, I AM ABOUT TO BE EATEN.” It’s primal, it’s physical, and it’s what our brains’ ancient wiring is built for. Let’s call the part of our brain responsible for this the Primal Panic Button. It’s a big, red, tempting button that, when pressed, floods our system with adrenaline and cortisol and tells us to do one of three things: run away, fight, or play dead and hope the lion gets bored.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have Modern Malaise.
This is the vague, chronic, and often nameless dread of the 21st century. It’s the stress of not being eaten by a lion. It’s the anxiety of having too many choices, the pressure of self-optimization, the existential vertigo of trying to find meaning in a world where the old signposts are gone. It’s your Primal Panic Button being accidentally nudged all day long by emails, social media notifications, and the quiet hum of your own expectations.
The core of our journey is to figure out how humanity’s relationship with these two types of misery has changed over time.
Part 1: Life in the Factory Default Setting (Our First 300,000 Years)
Let’s meet Gronk.
Gronk is our ancestor from, say, 50,000 BC. He’s living the life that our brains and bodies were originally designed for. He is operating on factory settings.
What does Gronk’s Misery Spectrum look like? It’s almost entirely Survival Stress.
His daily to-do list:
- Find food before the strange gnawing in his stomach turns into catastrophic organ failure.
- Avoid being eaten by the many, many things that find him delicious.
- Don’t get a small cut on his foot, because that could get infected and kill him in three days.
- Keep the fire going, because a cold night could be his last.
- Try to make sure his kids survive items 1 through 4.
Gronk’s Primal Panic Button is the central operating system of his life. It’s working perfectly. When he sees a cave bear, the button slams down, he gets a jolt of pure, unadulterated terror, and he runs. The stress is intense, but it’s also simple. It’s what we call acute stress: it has a clear beginning and a clear end. Either you escape the bear, or you don’t. If you do, the stress hormones recede, and you get to enjoy the profound relief of not being dead.
Is Gronk suffering from internal, existential dread? Probably not. He doesn’t have time. He’s not wondering, “Am I living my most authentic life?” He’s wondering, “Will that rustling in the bushes eat me?” His purpose is brutally, beautifully clear: see the sun rise tomorrow.
This is the first, and original, function of worry: survival. Gronk’s worry is productive. When he imagines a predator at the watering hole, he’s not just catastrophizing; he’s problem-solving. This mental rehearsal allows him to devise a safer plan—maybe he brings a friend, or finds a different spot. His worry is a tool that directly increases his chances of living another day. It’s the reason his brain developed this capacity in the first place.
His social anxieties are also pretty straightforward. His tribe is small, maybe 50-100 people. He knows everyone. His social world is governed by another ancient part of the brain, a character we can call the Social Survival Mammoth.
Gronk’s Mammoth is terrified of social rejection, but the rules are simple. Be a good hunter. Share your food. Don’t steal Gronk-ette from the alpha. The goal isn’t to be popular; it’s to be not-banished.
So, for the vast majority of human history, our suffering was almost entirely external. The world was a terrifying death trap, and our stress was a rational response to that. Life was short, brutal, and full of lions.
Then, something changed. We got… organized.
Part 2: The Invention of the Worrying Classes (Ancient Civilizations)
Fast forward to Ancient Rome, around 100 AD. Let’s meet two people: Marcus and Felix.
Marcus is a wealthy senator. He lives in a sprawling villa with heated floors. He has slaves, eats lavish meals, and spends his days debating politics and philosophy.
Felix is a slave in Marcus’s household. His life is not his own.
This is a pivotal moment in the history of stress. For the first time, we have a huge chunk of the population, like Felix, whose Survival Stress is still incredibly high. He can be beaten, sold, or killed on a whim. Famine and disease are still major players. For him, the world is still a very dangerous place, and his stress is largely external.
But for Marcus, something new is happening. The threat of being eaten by a lion has receded dramatically. He has a steady food supply. He’s safe. By Gronk’s standards, Marcus is living in paradise.
So, is Marcus stress-free?
Absolutely not. His stress has just… mutated. It’s moved inward. His Misery Spectrum is shifting towards Modern Malaise.
His Primal Panic Button, now bored and underemployed, starts looking for other things to worry about. And it finds them in the complex social world of Rome. His Social Survival Mammoth is no longer just worried about being banished; it’s now obsessed with status.
Marcus’s anxieties sound eerily familiar:
- “Did I sound foolish in the Senate today?”
- “That joke I made at the feast didn’t land. Do people think I’m a buffoon?”
- “Gaius just bought a new villa with a fancier mosaic. Am I falling behind?”
- “The Emperor looked at me funny. Am I about to be purged?”
This last one is key. While the physical threats have lessened, the social threats have become existential. For a Roman elite, losing favor could mean losing your property, your family, and your life. His Mammoth is right to be freaking out.
This is the birth of Status Anxiety, and it’s here we see the other functions of worry beginning to emerge.
The second function of worry is magical thinking. This is the brain’s erroneous belief that worrying about something can prevent it from happening. Marcus’s brain isn’t just assessing threats; it’s performing a ritual. It thinks, “Because I spent all night worrying about my speech, it went okay. Therefore, the worry worked.” This creates a powerful reinforcement loop. The worry gets credit for preventing a disaster that was probably never going to happen anyway.
The third function of worry is emotional avoidance. Worrying feels active. It feels like you’re doing something. For Marcus, the act of worrying about his social standing provides a distraction from a deeper, more uncomfortable feeling: the quiet dread of insignificance, or the emptiness that can accompany a life of luxury. It’s easier to spin in the hamster wheel of anxious thoughts than it is to sit with the raw feeling of sadness or fear. Worry becomes a buffer, a way to stay in your head to avoid feeling what’s in your heart.
And what about existential dread? It’s here, too. With the basic survival questions answered, Marcus has the luxury of asking bigger ones. “What is the point of all this? What is a good life?” It’s no coincidence that this is when Stoic philosophy flourished. Thinkers like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius were essentially writing the first self-help books for dealing with the anxieties of a complex, wealthy society. They were trying to figure out how to be happy when you have everything and still feel empty. They were trying to tame the overactive Panic Button and the neurotic Mammoth, who were now addicted to the false rewards of unproductive worry.
So in the ancient world, we see a great divergence. For the majority (the slaves, the poor), stress is still mostly external and brutal. But for the elite, a new kind of internal suffering is born from the ashes of their conquered survival needs.
Part 3: The Age of Certainty and Dread (The Middle Ages)
Let’s jump forward again, to medieval Europe. Let’s meet a peasant named Thomas, around 1350.
What’s his life like? In many ways, it’s a step back towards Gronk. Life is nasty, brutish, and short. The Four Horsemen—War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death—aren’t abstract concepts; they’re your neighbors. The Black Death has just ripped through, killing a third of the continent. Your local lord can tax you into oblivion or conscript you into a pointless war. Survival Stress is back with a vengeance.
But there’s a new, incredibly powerful layer of internal stress and meaning: The Church.
For Thomas, the universe is not a random, chaotic place. It’s a grand, divine story, and he has a role in it. This provides an immense sense of purpose and order. It answers the biggest existential questions before he even thinks to ask them. Why are we here? To serve God. What happens when we die? You go to Heaven or Hell.
This certainty is a powerful antidote to some forms of anxiety. But it creates a new one of its own: Existential Quota Stress.
The ultimate source of stress is no longer just dying, but dying wrong. The stakes have been raised from mere oblivion to infinite, conscious torment. The Social Survival Mammoth is still there, worried about what the village thinks of you. But now there’s a Divine Surveillance Mammoth, and it’s worried about what God thinks of you. And God is always watching.
Every misfortune—a failed crop, a sick child—could be interpreted as a sign of divine displeasure. The source of suffering is both external (the failed crop) and internal (the conviction that you deserve it because of your sins).
So, in the Middle Ages, the external and internal are woven together in a way we haven’t seen before. The world is terrifying, but it’s terrifying in a way that makes sense. The suffering is immense, but it’s meaningful. It’s a test. This is a world with very little Modern Malaise, but an abundance of Survival Stress and a profound, spiritually-charged dread.
Part 4: The Great Unmooring (The Modern Era to Today)
Okay, now our time machine goes into overdrive. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the 20th century… a series of explosions that completely reshaped the human experience.
For the sake of our sanity, let’s group this all into the “Great Unmooring.”
The core story of the last 500 years is this: we systematically dismantled the two pillars that defined life for Medieval Thomas: the constant threat of external doom and the absolute certainty of a divine plan.
Science and technology began to conquer Survival Stress. We developed vaccines, sanitation, and industrial agriculture. The chance of dying from a plague, a famine, or a tooth abscess plummeted. For the first time in history, a majority of people in the developed world could reasonably expect to live a long life, free from the constant, grinding threat of imminent death.
At the same time, the Enlightenment and secularism dismantled the pillar of certainty. The divine checklist was replaced with a terrifying blank page. The question was no longer “How do I fulfill my purpose?” but “How the hell do I figure out what my purpose is?”
We were suddenly safe, and we were suddenly lost.
This is the perfect breeding ground for Modern Malaise to go from being a niche problem for Roman senators to the dominant form of suffering for millions. Our brain’s ancient worry circuit, now largely unemployed from its primary survival job, becomes addicted to its secondary functions.
- An ambiguous email from your boss? PANIC! Your brain engages in magical thinking (“If I worry about this enough, I won’t get fired”) and emotional avoidance (it’s easier to obsess over the email than to feel the underlying fear of instability).
- Seeing someone’s curated vacation photos on Instagram? PANIC! (Is my life deficient? Am I failing at the new religion of happiness?)
- Reading the news? PANIC! (The world is ending, but in a slow, abstract way I can’t run away from.)
The neural pathways for worry become deeply entrenched. The perceived rewards—the temporary relief from uncomfortable emotions, the illusion of control—reinforce the habit. Your brain becomes addicted to a cycle that offers short-term relief at the cost of long-term peace.
Our Social Survival Mammoth is also going haywire. Gronk’s tribe was 100 people. Your tribe is potentially 8 billion people. You are no longer just comparing yourself to the other hunters in your village; you’re comparing yourself to the most successful, beautiful, and happy-looking people on the entire planet. It’s a game you cannot win.
We’ve created a new set of existential quotas, but they’re self-imposed and much vaguer than the medieval checklist.
This is the core of the Modern Malaise. We have traded the stress of external hardship for the stress of internal expectation. We are crushed not by the weight of our suffering, but by the weight of our potential.
Conclusion: Who Had It Worse?
It’s tempting to look back at Gronk and Thomas and think, “Wow, my anxiety about my career is so trivial compared to their fear of plague.” And in a way, that’s true. If you offered Thomas a ticket to the 21st century, with its hot showers, penicillin, and abundance of food, he’d probably take it in a heartbeat. The reduction in raw, physical suffering is a triumph we should never take for granted.
But that’s not the whole story.
The human brain is not a great judge of objective reality. It’s a reality-grading machine that works on a curve. It doesn’t care how good things are in an absolute sense; it cares how good they are relative to expectations.
Gronk expected life to be a brutal struggle. When he survived another day, it was a victory.
Thomas expected life to be a test of faith. When he suffered, it had meaning.
We expect life to be happy. We are told from birth that we can be anything we want to be, that happiness is a choice, that we should follow our dreams. We have built a civilization that is incredibly effective at creating comfort and spectacularly bad at providing meaning.
So when we feel anxious, empty, or unfulfilled, we don’t just feel bad; we feel like we’re failing. We feel like we’re defective. Our suffering feels pointless. A failed crop in 1350 was a tragedy. A feeling of emptiness in 2025 is a personal failure.
This, I think, is the unique cruelty of modern stress. We are haunted by the ghosts of the lives we could be living. Our suffering is quieter, less bloody, but it’s insidious. It’s a low-grade fever of the soul.
The Final Tally
So, what’s the answer? Were historical stressors primarily external or internal?
The answer is that they’ve always been both, but the ratio has dramatically shifted.
For most of history, the scale was tipped heavily towards the external. The environment was the primary source of stress, and our internal world was organized around surviving it.
Today, for many of us, the scale has tipped dramatically towards the internal. Our environment is the safest it has ever been, and our internal world has become the primary source of our suffering. We have become our own lions.
The journey from Gronk to us is a story of trading one set of problems for another. We’ve traded the fear of starvation for the anxiety of choice. We’ve traded the fear of predators for the fear of insignificance. We’ve traded the fear of damnation for the fear of a meaningless life.
Is this a good trade? I think so. I’d rather be wrestling with my own expectations than with a cave bear. But it’s a trade that comes with a new set of challenges. The great task of our time is not to conquer the world, but to understand and retrain our own minds. It’s to recognize worry not as a passive state, but as an active, ingrained habit.
The path forward involves consciously breaking the cycle. It means distinguishing between productive, Gronk-style worry and the unproductive loops of modern malaise. It means scheduling time to deal with actionable problems instead of letting them run in the background all day. It means challenging our magical thinking by daring to imagine positive outcomes. And most importantly, it means building the courage to confront our emotions directly, to sit with the discomfort instead of using worry as a distraction.
It’s about learning how to navigate the vast, uncharted territory of our own minds, to tame the overactive Panic Button and the neurotic Mammoth, and to find a sense of purpose on that terrifyingly blank page.
It’s a quieter, more subtle struggle than the ones our ancestors faced. But it’s a struggle all the same. And it’s ours.
