Research Blog #9: Counter-Argument

The argument for my research paper as of now is that stress is individualized. This means that everyone has their own sources of stress, and therefore they need to find individual ways to cope with their stress. In my paper I will discuss why college students are so vulnerable to stress. Millennial college students are faced with increasingly high tuition and therefore a lot more stress to carry than previous college students. This is just one of the factors that cause them stress. I will include in my paper the different ways that Ken Ilgunas, from Walden on Wheels, copes with his stress that stems from student debt. From there, I can introduce my counter-argument, in which I will use Dana Becker's book called One Nation Under Stress: The Trouble With Stress as an Idea as my main source. She expresses the idea that stress is not individualized but it actually stems from the social conditions surrounding us. She believes we should not strive to decrease our own stress, but we should try to stop the overall problem of stress. In her book she states,"The stress concept draws the outside in- and in such a way that we end up believing that we need to change ourselves so that we can adjust to societal conditions, rather than changing the conditions themselves" (3 Becker). Her idea is vey different from what Ilgunas follows, because Ilgunas changes himself in order to reduce stress and Becker feels that is not the solution; it only diverges our attention from the problem at large. I agree with Ilgunas' method of dealing with stress, although maybe not to the extent he took it to, and that is why individualized stress will be emphasized throughout my paper, along with Becker's idea as the counter-argument.