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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2598 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.

Do you read a lot of news or social media? Try cutting all that out for a while.

The Reddit algorithms get me to waste more time than I would like. Intuitively, I know they are feeding me variants of the same things and that it is all a waste of time. I need to do better at not opening the app. I don’t use Snap/Instagram/TikTok at all.

I feel a little bit of conflict about cutting all news and social media out though because I like to stay connected and informed. I want to be able to keep up with IRL conversations (which often involve online trends and news) and know about trends that can impact the stock market.

I suggested it because I feel like your anxieties come from reading the news and feeling like you have a duty to be informed and concerned about what you read. Your worries aren't about personal problems. If you weren't reading external sources, would you notice these issues in your day to day life?

Worrying about these things is net negative. It makes you feel bad and doesn't actually change anything. You are not obliged to stress about the state of the world.

If you weren't reading external sources, would you notice these issues in your day to day life?

Mostly yes because I initially noticed something IRL that caused me to dig for explanatory data. The triggers are things like:

  • Wanting to buy a house, so I dig to understand the market conditions.
  • Not having success on dating apps, so I dig to understand why and if this is a common problem for other men.
  • People around me talking about things they encountered on the internet and me digging to understand why I was so out of the loop.

However, once I have the information that I need I don’t stop digging. At that point it becomes unhealthy and causes anxiety. I agree that I need to reduce the time I spend reading news/social media, and I need to be more intentional about filtering the information to get just the small amount I need.

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