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Wellness Wednesday for October 19, 2022

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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What advice do people here have for living among people they can't stand or see as ideological enemies? I'm very contrarian. I have foolishly bought into the narratives from both the right and the left about why their opposing parties are bad but neither of the narratives from either party about why their own party is good. I have a very low opinion of nearly all fellow Americans. I have been traveling outside of the US for the better part of the year and it has been fantastic being able to meet people who barely know who Donald Trump is, but I'm absolutely dreading going back to the US and being pulled back into the muck and the entirely degrading discourse of the political environment. To make matters worse, I am self employed and can work from anywhere so any return to the US would be by my own will and it will absolutely make me feel like an idiot to be back in the culture I'm so happy to be away from. Though I will be happy to see my family again and experience the big beautiful open empty spaces and long straight roads that lead nowhere. (Those are the things I miss the most.)

So, yeah, any advice? Do I just need to get over myself and practice acceptance and just meet people where they're at? I had a really (to me) innocuous vaguely centrist comment get downvoted into oblivion tonight on reddit and it's triggering the same irritation that I felt every day while I was in the US so I just wanted to get some help from people who might be able to relate to being a contrarian in a world where everyone seems so invested in things you'd rather ignore. I wish I could go back to before 2016 when I didn't care at all about politics and was able to ignore the news. Should I quit reading the news and places like themotte cold turkey? I just find this place really intellectually stimulating in a way that I don't experience elsewhere so it would be such a loss to me if I didn't keep lurking here, but at the same time it's not helping me think more kindly of my fellow man

Albuquerque is middling-blue and Rio Rancho, a suburb which became a city, is middling-red. I get a sense here that politics is something which happens elsewhere, except at election time.

Both are mid-sized cities, 570,000 for Albuquerque, the 32nd-most populous city in the United States and the fourth-largest in the Southwest, and 105,000 for Rio Rancho.