Why is Stress and Tension past and parcel of modern life?

[M@$hA@l g0t $uMth!nG 2 $@y!]

Please answer. Long answers will be appreciated.

[Daniel]

because we live in a life that is go, go, go, go. It doesn't have to be a part of your life though. You can just choose another way!

[Rachel]

We think of all of our modern conveniences are going to make our lives easier. A dishwasher to wash our dishes for us, microwave to make cooking faster, cell phones to connect with people instantly, facebook to hear about all of our friend's mundane activities throughout the day. While, in some way, this does make our lives easier, but in other ways it is actually the cause of our stress. We are no longer spending as much time as families washing dishes and making meals together. Our lives have sped up so fast we feel that we can't keep up with it. We can't go anywhere without people contacting us all hours of the day. We waste endless hours on the internet feeding our facebook addictions and don't have time for the things that really matter.

At heart, we want time with our families, time to meditate and strengthen our spirituality, couple time with our spouses. Families use to play more together. They didn't have TVs in every room to distract them or endless video games. They worked together. They didn't have machines to do a lot of their daily tasks that took time (but also gave them time to talk to one another while they were doing it). Their lives had a slower pace. They had more time for things that were important.

On top of all that, no matter where you live in the world, our economy is collapsing. Many families are feeling the pain of losing their home, a job, the loss of a lifestyle they once enjoyed. We have war occurring all over the world. There is much uncertainty about what our future's hold. Our freedoms are systematically being taken from us. All of this adds to our stress.

[Lara]

Think back to times even under five hundred years ago, where was the stress. You knew where you were going in life, if your parents worked on the farm so would you and if your father owned the farm you would be sure that you would own it too.
Modern life brings with it lots of uncertainty, it is not often that you start nursery at 3 years old and leave at 18 with the same career idea. You even hear about people who are doing different careers than what they have a degree in, it seems like society is a mould and people are just expected to fit into it. That brings a lot of stress.
People are doing jobs that make them miserable just because they are the only ones available and that instantly make them bad at them. People seem to have lost their passion for their jobs and the pressure to have things such as kids, a wife, a big house in the suburbs seem to be taking over their desire to do what they want with their lives.
People were not meant to live such confusing life and I do not think that we are equipped to deal with it all, the illusion of a "normal" person in society which so many people try to achieve fails every time because in this world you can't have everything. Obviously if you strip down the stress factors such as work, dating etc to the basics they are the same as they were in the past: putting food on the table and having children to pass on your genes. But it seems that we are going about it in the most complicated way.
There are so many add ons too, social networking, fashion, music, all marketing ideas to make you buy things but they just make you want to fit in. Even "hipsters" and people like that who try so hard to prove they are not part of the heirachy are just another pawn in society, the government and various coorporation's games.
The real victims and recievers of this stress and tension are children who are pressured by so much media to buy things and be people and children should be left to make these decisions on their own and they shouldn't be indoctrinated that way.
The world as we know it is corrupt and it puts an unimaginable amount of stress on the average person to make ends meet because we are in a recession and it seems like the average person is the worst off in all of this.
The worst thing is that there seems to be no way out of it. You can't quit your job and move to the wild and live like a caveman, we would find it too hard as we were all raised differently, even the fittest of us would struggle to survive in the wild. So it seems like we are stuck in a catch 22 of unhappiness until we achieve some sort of impossible utopia. I hope we do some day.
:/