Stress, Anxiety, and Myspace?

Benjamin Franklin once said, “The only things certain in life are death and taxes.” Fast forward a couple hundred years and it’s clear today that he left off another certainty: stress. That little 6-letter word can unite millions of people across the globe, probably more so than death and taxes as some of us has yet to experience the former, and others are constantly finding ways to evade the latter. Ah, stress, what an unfortunate unifying force you are!
 

So why is modern society more stressed out than the ones of the past? Is it possible that the simpler, technologically-retarded times of our ancestors warrants a more stress-free lifestyle (with the fear of war, religious genocides and deadly epidemics put aside, of course)? I say: absolutely, yes! And who (or what) is the culprit of this omnipresent phenomenon called stress? Myspace! Yes, Myspace. (No offense, Tom, but you started all of this).
 

It used to be that in the ancient times—AKA the early 90’s—the internet was still a relatively new thing for the masses. Not everyone had easy access to it and for the those of us who did, we had dial-up working against us. But today, connection speed is lightning fast and everyone’s business is now, well, everyone’s business. People air out their dirty laundry on the web as if it’s headline news, and Myspace helped make it whole lot easier to do so. Want to know if someone is married, makes more than $100K a year, and enjoys the same guilty pleasures you do? Just check out their Myspace page.
 

With Myspace, your connections to other social circles are unlimited and transparent, which can be a scary thing. Why? Well, if you break up with your girlfriend for another, you can be sure she’ll blog it about and it’ll be read by your friends and your mother. If you’re a hardcore partier who have comments on your wall about the less than legal things you did last night, you can be sure a job recruiter will laugh at your application claims of being responsible. In the old days, you had better chances of people forgetting your mistakes. Today, there’s no longer the luxury of starting over; no longer can you move to another town where no one’s heard of you and no one will be able to find you on the Internet. The pressure from living under such a microscope and the ability to be easy exposed can be daunting. It’s no wonder that most people today are having panic attacks left and right, and are always medicated. They can’t get away with anything.