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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2600 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for June 12, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Does anyone have tips for dealing with feelings of anxiety/hopelessness?

I feel like my mental health is being negatively impacted by things outside of my control and that these things are going to get worse in the near the future.

  • Social media is doing a lot of damage to people’s mental health, attention spans, and ability to connect with people outside their bubbles. Over time social media continues to become more addicting and gets better at identifying people’s emotional buttons and how to push them. This results in anxiety, anger, conspiratorial thinking/paranoia, and other mental health problems. The people in power have no incentive to address any of these problems because they get money/power from the status quo.
  • Economic policies have exacerbated wealth inequality. If you don’t already have substantial wealth then it seems nearly impossible to build much wealth through selling your labor. Asset ownership seems to be a much more viable path toward wealth generation but young people that didn’t inherit wealth are at a huge disadvantage in this system.
  • AI is going to make it harder for people without wealth to build wealth because it devalues their labor.
  • The shift to online dating has made it harder for many heterosexual people to find meaningful long-term relationships because it selects for superficial traits. There are fewer places where it is acceptable to flirt in-person which makes it harder for men to attract women by demonstrating character/virtue over time. Additionally, the high ratio of men to women on dating apps makes many men feel invisible and many women feel overwhelmed.
  • Politicians are not addressing these problems in any meaningful way and are actively making things worse by distracting us with bullshit.

If you don’t already have substantial wealth then it seems nearly impossible to build much wealth through selling your labor.

What leads you to believe this and when do you perceive it as starting? I finished a postdoc a decade ago and had pretty close to zero net worth at the time, but I'm doing great now. I've seen a decent number of friends go from near zero or negative net worth at the time to quite wealthy since. All of us that have done well do have some sort of specialized skill but saying that making money is greatly helped by having a specialized skill is very different from claiming that labor can't build wealth.

The economic situation seems to be a lot more grim for GenZ. I don't know if its reflecting in the youth unemployment numbers in the US, but the future points more towards a East Asian/ European like labor market. Not the end of the world, but certainly not what it used to be.

Definitely a global issue, finding employment as a college grad seems to be an increasingly omnipresent issue.

Anecdotal but I can't ignore the noise, something is definitely off even if the numbers haven't caught up yet.

Maybe that's right, maybe it's not, but if it's a signal that's sufficiently weak that it's hard to detect in the data, the advice for any given individual should be to get their shit together rather than moping about systemic decline that makes it impossible for them to profit from labor. Get a degree in petroleum engineering or accounting or chemistry or literally anything else that has a plausible practical use and get to work. Even if there is a broader problem, being a Debbie Downer and giving up before even getting started is a poor approach to life. Being a Debbie Downer in the context of the American economy circa the present isn't just a poor approach, it's comically ridiculous if one takes even a slightly zoomed out look at history.

Yeah, even if it were indisputably true that the US economy is in decline, it's declining from the highest heights in human history. Even if Gen Z ends up being a bit worse off than Millennials, they're still better off than the vast majority of people who have ever lived.

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