The article is tailing off a well-established historiographic narrative that it cites at the beginning (Will Self) but doesn’t dwell on much.

Basically, the common argument is that life WAS emphatically much more brutal in the preindustrial past, and people felt the same grief that we do today — however, such events were less likely to serve as an etiology of chronic anxiety-centered conditions like PTSD for a multitude of reasons. E.g. you can’t lay around depressed in bed all day if you rely on subsistence agriculture because you’re going to slowly and painfully starve, or you’re exposed and desensitized to brutality from a younger age, or you have less strict social requirements/expectations than a modern 9-5 would impose so you can grieve and act out on your own terms, etc.

Dan Carlin’s “Painfotainment” is a good self-contained intro to these ideas for a casual audience, if it seems up your alley.

it's not only that. trauma also hits differently if you are the only one experiencing it vs everyone around you. the group experience itself makes trauma easier to handle.

i believe (i don't know enough about this) a big factor is also how your peers treat you after you experience trauma. think about veterans coming home, friends and family don't understands what they went through. they can't talk to anyone because nobody takes them seriously, even to the point of disbelief, or they blow things out of proportion, make them into bigger thing than what the person actually experienced. maybe the veteran doesn't feel any pain, but they tell him that he should. either way, the veteran is completely misunderstood. (again, this is not backed by any knowledge of psychology, just a guess based on some personal experience)

so because in the past everyone experienced the same brutal life (except the land lords or otherwise well off), it wasn't as traumatic as it would be today.

Well, I remember reading an article some time after 9/11 where they studied the incidence of PTSD in New York following that event.

Even in areas that were some distance from the towers there was a relatively high incidence. They put it down to a background level of stress including sources like violence on TV.

This was in comparison to other parts of the world that were less modern and less busy than experienced more traumatic events but had less PTSD. The conclusion was that if you generally have a more boring/ quiet life you will be better able to absorb trauma if it occurs.

Yes, and the article explores none of that. Complaining about stress from rent being high would be much more palatable if they explored those types of things, or simply didn't mention it at all. Instead they focus on the stress being from high rent vs from the reasons you point out. The way they use that quote makes it seem like they didn't read or understand the larger text, but just cherrypicked what fit with their narrative.

> you can’t lay around depressed in bed all day if you rely on subsistence agriculture because you’re going to slowly and painfully starve

What makes you think this wasn't common?