On a weekend day, probably a Saturday, almost ten years ago, we were out and about on a hike with four or five other couples who likewise had brought their toddler-age children. I do not remember much of the outing, except for bits and pieces of a conversation with another dad, who I had just met that day, minutes before the beginning of our walk.
It had been a very busy week at work. I was relieved to be walking, out in nature and away from the desk. Again, I don’t remember the details, but I did share some of the busyness of the previous days, to which he responded along the lines of “wow – that’s a lot! Stressful!”
“Yes! That’s right, it was!” We walked on a bit – and then I asked “so, how about yourself? What do you do; what was your week like?”
“I’m a medical doctor and I work in the oncology ICU.”
“Oh, wow. Well, I got nothing. Your days sound way more stressful than mine.
“Eh. Stress is stress”
We continued on, talked about our respective schedule complexities, challenges of parenting, et cetera. It ended up being a great day out.
That one statement has stayed with me since: Stress is stress.
Stress is difficult to compare. I do not mean that in the sense that some things are not obviously more intense than others. If you imagine different situations, such as an angry customer yelling at you, a pleasant stroll around a lake, waiting in the waiting room for your doctor appointment – you might have an idea of how stressful you consider them and how they compare against each other.
Rather, a person’s experience of that stress is a personal one. In that sense, you cannot really tell at all whether or how much stress a person experiences, unless you also know what exactly it is like to be them. If you were in their position you may experience more or less stress than them, because you are not them.
My wife happens to be working in medical technology, in transfusion services at a large hospital. I admire her for her work and the cool head she necessarily brings to it. Urgent or emergent situations during her work day can mean bleeding incidents: Lives are at stake. It sounds incredibly intense and I marvel at how she and her colleagues do this, day after day.
Yet, on multiple occasions, when I have told her about situations that are probably common in many tech startup environments (unplanned downtimes due to production incidents, high-stakes compliance reviews, software architecture discussions, team conflicts, et cetera) – she would at times shake her head and indicate, unironically “sounds stressful – I don’t know how you do it.”
Your stress is yours – and theirs is theirs.