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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I build reward systems to try to get myself to be productive. These generally involve working set amounts of time on a few different tasks, dieting, and rewarding myself with things like going out to eat or watching a movie. It's very stressful to start a system, and in one sense "stressful" to keep it going and work hard rather than spending all my time reading and playing videogames, but overall I'd say I'm much happier while in a system and being very productive.
Systems generally last a week or two, followed by a few days to a week of malaise before I start a new system. I'm on to number 90 since I started counting them. Each system is honestly very useful in the sense that I learn more about how my own brain works. Only recently (in the last 3ish systems) have I learned that an enormous failure mode for me is to "break" the system in seemingly positive ways, either by deciding not to hold to the system's rewards or do more work than the system requires. I feel stressed, decide to do 8 hours of work rather than 6, and then end up doing no work at all.
I'm smart enough (1600 on SAT), but anything more than a year out feels fake so I'm stuck in a reasonably good white-collar job rather than anything more impressive. And I have no college degree so if I ever lose that job, it's bad news for me. I'd like to live up to some fraction of my potential. Adderall helps a lot but is scary--it can help me work way harder, but days when I don't want to work it also helps me game for way longer and waste more time before getting bored. It's a motivation multiplier, but right now my motivation is negative.
So, how to defeat akrasia? How does one lengthen their time horizons and truly spend time better? I have a reasonably good expectation that these systems will eventually work out when I understand myself better but I'd rather not wait 10 years for system 1000 to find one that really works long-term.
Having a nice, comfortable, good white collar job seems like a good place to figure out what, beyond work, you really want in life and how to get it.
For sure. As far as I can tell I'm the only thing standing in my own way, so the only question is how to get more work done.
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