Pressure

We focus so much on the pressure that young people feel due to the gorgeous, skinny models on all of the magazines and the strong men in all of the movies; but we're forgetting about the different pressures that influence people all of the time. They're not as obvious, so people don't tend to think about them.

Right now I'm taking a fiction writing class, and we're reading a book by John Gardner called The Art of Fiction. He talks about how you have to be dedicated to the point where you'll choose writing over friends or simple pleasures in order to be a good writer. That's a lot of pressure! What if you're an extrovert and being social is necessary for you to keep balance in your life? It makes it really difficult and stressful because you know you want to be a writer, but you might not live up to John Gardner's expectations or the expectations of other writers.

To link it back to Plato, in his aristocracy, there would be a lot of pressure for youths to do well in school if they wanted to be more than a worker or a law enforcer. They have to be what the philosophers consider "smart enough" to gain passage into a system of higher education in which they can climb the ladder to become a leader. Imagine the kind of stress that would invoke!

There's a lot of pressure in our world coming from so many sources that it's no wonder that people have such high stress levels!