90% of the people who compain about stress do not know what they are talking about. The last 3 generations have been pampered no end. and it has gotten worse, It started with Baby-Boomers, wnet on to Gen-X and is wort in "Millenials ala (the "participation trophy" generation). You would not have survived as adults 60 years ago
Having been pampered they don't know how to deal with what was ordinary life in my early years. So they are soft, just as when one starts playing guitar, the fingers bleed but then recover and the skin becomes strong enough to take the pressure
The other factor is the 24/7 deluge of pop culture including the degraded pop psych and "womb to tomb" governemtn care. WhenI was 16,my media consumption was about 10 hours a week of TV and 21 hours a week radio. Music was very much a major media function in my home and some sports. We did not have all the cotton-headed 'ologists telling us what we should feel and the like (we had other phonies but they were not as oppressively ominpresent as the psychobabble Establishment is today). I was outdoors a good deal of the time, reading or doing some self-starting thing or stuff that I was required to do so I always knew or could decide what to do with myself
It is true that today there are different sources of stress such as debt, job issues; if you can find a job, regulations (a kid bites a pop-tart in the shape of a gun and gets put through the whole "zero-tolerance" horror show), the doomsday cults both religious and secular spewing out their crapola, like Coast to Coast and fed through the media stream and the stifling presence and dominance of our culture by the corrupt and inept political class, doing the work of the ologists ans communicated by the mediacrats but this grew up over time and is part of the 24/7 pop-culture blitz
As ( say, 90% of the "stress", "self-esteem", and the rest of it is just whining and carping that, 50 years ago, you were told to get over and you did get over it. but back then, it wasn't jammed into your head 24/7
Also, people actuall had hobbies, things in which they were interested but not at the level of vocation; since there was no 24/7 media blitz, we had time to develop interests and that's how we 'unwond" or as they said in the 1970's "ventilated" and later "decompresses" abd we were not a collection of hyphenated Americans or "pride"s and "identity" groups at each other's throats. You notice you do not hear me spoutting about "LG pride", when I read about "sissy pride" I nearly fell off the chair and said to myself "come on; get real", I live as an individual first and a member of (several) groups a distant second as was our nature. We had not had our souls eaten away by Collectivism and all that it engendered