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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   1448 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for January 1, 2025

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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How to deal with demotivation around feeling too old? That is, the persistent feeling that there's no point in starting anything to try to develop a skill, complete a large project, or make an effort toward a large life-improvement goal, because before I can get anywhere meaningful enough to justify the effort, I'll be dead — there's just not enough time left in my life to get anything of note done, so all that's left is to sit down and pass the time waiting to die.

Numbers. How old exactly?

I replied elsewhere in the thread: 43.

Buddy, this is just distorted thinking. Unless you have some known terminal illness, you're only halfway through your life. 40-50 more years is a tremendous amount of time to develop skills and reap dividends thereby.

Your attitude is more appropriate for a 70-year-old.

If you don't already: have kids. It's a new sort journey and one that doesn't end when you die.

Unemployed Alaskan men in their forties are not particularly considered a ‘catch’ on the U.S. dating market.

Luckily Alaska is also amply supplied (although maybe fewer per capita than other areas) with Large Ladies Deserving of Attention!

although maybe fewer per capita than other areas

Alaska has had the most male-skewed sex ratio of any state since before I was born.

Yes -- you need to pick up on the market inefficiencies lying behind this stat.

I have absolutely no idea what you mean here.

I'm guessing @jkf is implying he should turn gay, which doesn't even pass as a joke, because jokes are funny.

No dude -- there are fewer women in alaska, meaning that there are even fewer hot women in alaska -- so all the eligible dudes are busy cycling through them. Leaving an underserved (Large Ladies) market for somebody who's life-goal is having kids. (which was the original topic of discussion; going gay won't help with that)

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It sounded like a substantial part of the problem is finding a woman willing to have children together.

I'm 56 and just started a month or two ago an exercise regimen that has already shown results. It consists of 3/4 workouts per week, starting with purely bodyweight (ie no equipment needed though a bar to do pullups helps). I am revisiting French and have made progress such that recently I could have a conversation with two separate French people (not talking about Sartre, but still). I suck at piano but am learning some songs that sound halfway decent. My point here is "too old" is a term relative to your state of mind. I will never again outrun my son (but I'm not supposed to at this point) but I can still run, goddamit.

Meditate on the mundane truthfulness and wisdom of corny motivational poster bromides that you have to get busy living. That's it. There is no esoteric big brained intellectual construct that will snap you out of yourself, you just have to get so fucking bored of being yourself that you do something differently for a change.

The point of starting something else is that the alternative is continuing on the current path which demonstrated by your post clearly isn't satisfying, so even if the something else isn't satisfying either at least it's novel.

You said below you're writing prose and code. I suggest making something physical. I'm loathe to suggest specific projects because you take them too literally to more easily dismiss them but as an example, get a cheap block of modelling clay, cut it up into 5 pieces, then make five heads one at a time and try to make each one better than the last, 20 minutes per head. They'll suck, it doesn't matter. In fact that's the point. I know, you don't have modelling clay or an eye for faces so carve a large root vegetable into five different platonic solids, or whatever. Just do something very cheap and very easy that you can iterate on, see a measure of progress and then throw in the bin without feeling that the waste outweighs the practice. Something that you can take a before and after photo of the evidence of your action. The worthwhile projects you feel you are lacking are built on a foundation of shitty failed prototypes by necessity of not getting it right on the first attempt. Then pick a bigger project and start failing better.

If you need a less specific, more esoteric guide try something like Eno's Oblique Strategies or buy a copy of Wreck This Journal and give yourself a hard time limit of one week to fill it. You already have a limitations mindset so start using it to prompt some urgency and creativity. Feeling old should give you more motivation, not less. If you want to write prose or code give yourself one day to write something wilfully shitty and amateur, at least it will be finished. Writing is a procrastinator's luxury where you can always find another imperfection that can be endlessly re-re-rewritten. You don't have to abandon your big projects but take a break to recalibrate first because currently you're not actually hitting your own targets.

Meditate on the mundane truthfulness and wisdom of corny motivational poster bromides that you have to get busy living.

Or get busy dying.

The point of starting something else is that the alternative is continuing on the current path which demonstrated by your post clearly isn't satisfying, so even if the something else isn't satisfying either at least it's novel.

Or there's the third alternative: ending it all.

Maybe, but if you haven't done it by now, what would change to motivate you in that direction?

There are many alternatives.

You are asking about how to deal with demotivation. The implication is that you require some motivation to alleviate the feeling that you're too old and everything is pointless.

You have existing goals and you are losing time. You can choose to advance toward your goals or you can choose to remain static.

ending it all.

Stop thinking about ending and think about completion. "I'm stuck on level 7.2 and Mario has stopped moving. Should I throw my Nintendo in the bin?" No, just plug the controller back in.

You can choose to advance toward your goals

Which means nothing if I don't actually get there. This is why I hate the whole idea of "grading on effort." You either got the right answer or you didn't. You either accomplish a goal, or you don't. How much effort you put in is completely and totally irrelevant!

It doesn't matter if you fail to achieve a goal after thirty minutes, or thirty years. It doesn't matter if you spend your whole life in pursuit of the goal. The only thing that matters is that you failed! In fact, the latter is arguably worse, because you wasted time and effort on something that didn't work.

Results are the only thing that matters. If you try really hard to do something, but never succeed? Then you might as well have never tried at all.

No, just plug the controller back in.

I'm not grasping your metaphor here.

This is why I hate the whole idea of "grading on effort." You either got the right answer or you didn't. You either accomplish a goal, or you don't. How much effort you put in is completely and totally irrelevant!

That's exactly why I suggested goals that are trivially attainable, but ironically I suspect you dismissed them because they're too easy and thus not worth the effort. I'll explain my reason why:

If you never achieve your goal despite your efforts it means you were pursuing an unachievable goal, which is a failure and a tragedy and waste, and that's naturally very depressing.

I've read numerous books and articles on depression, and the best explanation I've found wasn't that it was a chemical imbalance, or a lack of daylight or physical exertion. It's that depression is a natural reaction to the repeated failure to achieve a goal. The feedback of failure is what alters the chemicals, and generates the low mood that influences a person to withdraw, whereupon they end up getting less daylight, less exertion, less socialising, etc etc. This is actually rational. Your biological substrate is compelling you to stop wasting its energy on something you/it demonstrably can't achieve.

You can force that away by tinkering with antidepressants and forcing yourself out there, and maybe that kickstarts the process, but it's skipping the most important step which is letting go of, or at least setting aside the goal that you repeatedly failed to achieve and recalibrating your ambition towards something more attainable. Then you have a new reason to get up and get going, because then you can get a successful outcome, and when you get the outcome you get the sweet conscious satisfaction plus the accompanying unconscious mood boosting chemicals. Or maybe you fail again, and the cycle resets, and you try something different until you find something that does deliver success.

Which means nothing if I don't actually get there

TLDR Go somewhere else, get somewhere else, and discover whatever the meaning is of getting there instead of the meaninglessness of not getting where you're not getting.

I've read numerous books and articles on depression, and the best explanation I've found wasn't that it was a chemical imbalance, or a lack of daylight or physical exertion. It's that depression is a natural reaction to the repeated failure to achieve a goal.

In the literature, this is called the "behavioral theory of depression" and it's supported by studies that suggest the behavioral components of psychotherapy -- like looking at maladaptive behaviors, setting goals, seeing how things that are satisfying in the short term actually distract from things that are more important in the long term -- are equally as effective as therapy with cognitive components. I tend to agree with this view, although daylight, physical exertion, and sometimes, yes, even thoughts can play a role. The "chemical imbalance" theory is obviously silly, but I would note that each person has a different tendency towards depressed states that has significant genetic factors, so obviously something biochemical has an influence.

I conceptualize depression as a "stuck" state, like a program trapped in a loop. Like you said, lots of things can "unstick" someone from that state: behavioral changes, deliberate changes in thought, removing yourself from an environmental condition that's causing stress, but also tweaking neurotransmitters or even just a shift in mindset from "I'm stuck" to "I'm going to be unstuck" can be enough to somehow break the cycle. To me, this explains why antidepressants work miracles for some people while doing little if anything for others; I think of antidepressants as "shake up the neurotransmitters" pills, and like a vending machine, sometimes a little percussive maintanence makes things work again -- and sometimes not. In particular, the blunting caused by antidepressants appears to help anxious people, and reducing someone's anxiety slightly might be enough to unstick them from the stuck state and get them moving again.

All of our treatments for depression are just varied ways of trying to shake things up enough that a patient will happen to become unstuck and fall into a positive feedback loop. IMO, that's why all forms of psychotherapy work about the same -- just for different people -- because we know the stuck state can exist but there's no agreement on what's actually going on psychologically or biochemically. Like you argue, it may be that depression is adaptive, but that modern lifestyles make it more likely to occur than is adaptive. It wouldn't be the first time!

It's depressing that psychology has so many entrenched schools all trying to fit the evidence into existing universal theories. It really does seem like everyone has a useful piece of the map (except for the guys who built an entire theory of the human mind out of the color print bars and some of the copyright logo).

Are there interdisciplinary efforts out there to reconcile this stuff, or do they not get supported?

I don't expect that this will be helpful, but this honestly just sounds ridiculous to me. I know guys in their 40s running PRs, guys in their 50s lifting heavy, guys in their 60s doing cool projects. Yeah, some things are going to be gone to the sands of time when it comes to being the best you could ever possibly have been, but learning and accomplishing news things remains entirely feasible well into middle-age and beyond. You're going to wind up dead eventually either way, why would that dissuade you from learning Brazilian Jiu Jitsu today?

You're going to wind up dead eventually either way, why would that dissuade you from learning Brazilian Jiu Jitsu today?

Because for me "learning Brazilian Jiu Jitsu" would be the project of many, many decades, if ever, given how poorly my childhood karate lessons went given the gross and fine motor skill problems from my Sensory Processing Disorder. (You know the thing that most people call "muscle memory"? Practically non-existent for me. You've ever heard it said of an uncoordinated person "can't walk and chew gum at the same time?" Yeah, part of my bad posture is that I'm always looking down, because I need to be able to see my feet and where I'm placing them to walk.)

Because for me "learning Brazilian Jiu Jitsu" would be the project of many, many decades

You'll be decades older anyway.

I don‘t believe you can‘t do sports. Or that it would take you longer than your life expectancy to achieve anything else. I generally don‘t believe depressed people when they make grandiose claims of incapacitation, exceptional uglyness, unworthiness, being ‚too adhd to work‘, etc. The causation goes: you‘re depressed, therefore you think you can‘t do anything, not : you can‘t do anything, therefore you‘re depressed.

OK, I guess if I thought I couldn't learn anything physical, I'd just give up too.

How old are you and what are some projects you’re considering?

43. Writing fiction. Writing a non-fiction book (political manifesto). Trying to improve my programming ability (I've been "learning to code," as it were, since a was a little boy writing in BASIC on an Apple IIc. I took a comp sci class at Caltech where we had to write in Scheme). Fatherhood (which starts with somehow managing to get a date for the first time in my life).

You can definitely learn to code well if you were Caltech material 20-25 years ago.

How old are you?

Sorry, I input my age as a number at the start of my reply, and the formatting turned it into a numerical list point. Should be fixed.

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