Daily Inspiration Quote by Janet Street-Porter

Stress, in Janet Street-Porter sardonically frames it, is less a medical condition than a status accessory: a "designer ailment" worn like an expensive label. The line skewers a particular late-20th-century professional class habit - turning exhaustion into credibility, overwork into moral proof. Calling the sufferers "so-called afflicted" needles the performance baked into modern busyness. You are not just stressed; you are important enough to be stressed.

What makes the quote work is its double move. On the surface it sounds almost cruel, as if dismissing genuine anxiety. Underneath, it targets the cultural economy that rewards strain. If your calendar is packed, your inbox on fire, your body running on cortisol, that is evidence you matter. Stress becomes a kind of social currency, a shorthand for ambition and indispensability, and Street-Porter is pointing out how quickly that currency can be flaunted.

The "with pride" sting lands because it names a familiar ritual: the competitive complaint. People swap war stories about lack of sleep the way others compare new purchases. In a media landscape that sells "wellness" on one page and glamorizes hustle on the next, stress gets packaged as both problem and proof of taste - curated like fashion. Street-Porter, as a journalist steeped in British cultural commentary, is diagnosing a society that has trouble distinguishing real suffering from the bragging rights of being perpetually in demand.