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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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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Anyone have tips for combatting the green-eyed monster? I often find myself begrudging others’ successes and good fortune. My resentment applies to friends [1], but also extends to people whom I barely know in passing (or even public figures).
[1] Although am I really their friend if I react this way?
If you have some time to invest, I'd suggest you read "Sadly, Porn." In either case I'll poorly summarize with many assertions without evidence (as goes the source material)
The urge that ensures we eat is hunger. The urge that makes us social is a type of pleasure from preventing someone else getting what they want. It is equivalent to our will to power. However this can be deeply antisocial and in modern times you'll be excommunicated for stating the truth.
The lie we most commonly tell to convince others (and ourselves) that we never hunger is the ledger. They don't deserve that because it is not fair. They owe me for how I helped them. Justifications for dessert. The ledger is pro social if your accounting is good, but the point of it is to cook the books.
Your envy is you trying to use the ledger to get to dessert. But the ledger is fake and your math is bad. There gain is not your loss and even if it were that's not why you are here.
Your prescription is to either to stop lying to yourself that there is a ledger. Satisfy this hunger when it doesn't truly hurt someone, not just when you have moral cover. Alternatively you could get better at accounting so your attempts to cook the books aren't convincing to yourself. I'd recommend the second because it is easier.
Wait what?? No it's not. On a fundamental level humans need allies. You don't get together with people just to harm them. Friendship is much closer to a stag hunt than a prisoner's dilemma.
The rational/evolutionary reason for wanting a social impulse is making allies. The mechanism by which that is implemented is crude.
Also just because you are denying them something they want does not mean you are making their life worse.
I don't know where you're getting this but it just isn't true. There are a thousand ways to interact with people and a thousand ways to derive enjoyment from those interactions. Sociality is how you win allies, find potential romantic partners, learn new information, make connections, etc.
I suppose in some very limited way there is some pleasure in denying others what they want, inasmuch as you're playing a status game, but that's quite a small fraction of the emotion involved in human interaction. At least for emotionally healthy people.
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