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).
Jump in the discussion.
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Does anyone have recommendations on finding real life social groups of like-minded people? As a remote programmer my job is pretty antisocial. I’ve been doing Muay Thai for a few months to supplement bodybuilding but forging friendships there is slow going. I’m agnostic and consider myself basically a Platonist, but I’m open to Christianity and have done some cursory church-shopping, but frankly most of the ones near me seem hyper-progressive, while I’m on the other end of that scale, and it has me doubting if I’d be joining for the right reasons. I’m open to basically anything, meetups, conferences, political organizations, Toastmasters, whatever. I’ve done theater and school choir in the past as well so I’m open to whatever, any suggestions appreciated.
Pub quizzes are good fun, and often a good fit for the kind of a person who obsessively and constantly scours the Internet for all sorts of information, as I suspect many here are.
I'm lucky to be in a team full of people with excellent sports and light entertainment knowledge, since those are often-present topics that I'm not particularly good with.
Of course finding a team might be an issue, I kind of stumbled to mine through a friend.
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Yes, I’ve had jobs at two previous companies prior to this that were in person. Unfortunately none of the people at either were especially sociable either, my first company felt like working in a library at times it was so quiet. Compounding this is that I don’t want to commute any longer as I hated how much of my day it consumed, and I don’t want my choice of where to live being tied to extreme urban centers if I don’t have to. I’ll keep your suggestion in mind as I’ve had similar thoughts before though. Sometimes I debate switching to more of a sales engineer type role since the majority of the job there is socializing in some form, though I worry about my technical skills atrophying as well.
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I am rapidly moving into the "remote work is terrible for our mental health" camp.
The trade-off, of course, is that I now live in a beautiful part of the country where my son is thriving, but there are absolutely no job opportunities for somebody in my field. If that were to change, I would be back in the office in a heartbeat.
Yeah it's a shame. Remote work has a ton of amazing pluses like no time wasted commuting, living where you like, making good salaries in LCOL areas, getting to choose who you socialize with, etc etc. But I'm beginning to think it's one of those instant gratification situations, where it feels good at first but is detrimental over the long term
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Try partner dance like East coast or west coast swing.
My girlfriend and I have discussed this before, and I’ll probably give this a shot. Though most of the groups I’ve looked into seem to have substantially older regulars than myself. Honestly I wish there were adult fraternities around to join, does anyone have any experience with Freemasons?
I would recommend West Coast swing, blues dancing, or some style of Latin dance like salsa or Kizomba if you’re looking for younger people.
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I see "dancing", "pottery", "volunteering at the animal shelter", and other female coded activities as things suggested to men struggling to meet women.
Am I the only one who finds the idea of doing any of those things dreadful? It's not that I think the people doing those things are fundamentally different from me or anything like that; More so that I just know I will not enjoy those activities at all, not even 1%, and that itself will be damaging to the pursuit of actually making connections with the people doing those activities, its like "I totally hate doing what you are doing, but lets hang out?", And also elements of "I'm so socially inept I have to do things I hate to meet people".
Seems to me for a guy like me who does WFH, has only male friends and hobbies are in a rather precarious situation.
Out of those, volunteering at the animal shelter surely can't be that bad? Getting to pet and feed dogs for a couple hours isn't the worst thing in the world...
Or you could be given logistics work or you have to go setup cat traps in the blistering heat for an entire day.
The playing with animals all day is a small part of the work needed to run a shelter.
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Personally, I like cats and dogs well enough on the screen. I can't imagine caring for one, even if I weren't allergic. I'm awkward around living creatures who are not intelligent enough to speak a language.
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Some of them, sure. Others sounded worth a try, at least; a few turned out to be things I really liked. There's a lot of female-leaning hobbies you could do socially, if you live in a city. Yoga? Book clubs? Choirs? Art classes?
If you go through every social event you can find, and hate everything that's at least evenly-mixed, then fair enough, don't go. Absolutely, "do things you hate just to leave the house" is a terrible idea that won't work.
Still, I'd be open to the possibility that there's more going on there. Maybe hating every option is less about the options, and more about how you feel about life?
Doesn't have to be! You can just really like male-dominated hobbies, that's totally fine. Worth considering, though.
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In Xenophon (iirc, it might have been somewhere in Plato, it's been a while) Socrates considered dancing the best preparation for war, and advised it over boxing/wrestling which he thought made men too bulky and hungry to make good soldiers.
IMHO, a big part of what makes a good partner in a marriage is adaptability to enjoying different things with your partner. Who wants to spend 50 years married to someone who will only enjoy his own hobbies and games and ideas, unless they share those same exact tastes? In my marriage, my wife has come to like baseball and tolerate football and get dragged to the opera or the symphony once a month; I've adapted to watching The Bachelor or 90s RomComs and viewing them as sociological documents, what does this say about the people watching it and the people competing on it? Did I disdain reality TV dating shows before? Yeah, but my wife wanted to watch, so I found the angle to enjoy it myself.
By saying not only "I don't naturally enjoy dancing" but "It is impossible for me to enjoy dancing;" you're revealing a problem with dating you.
In Republic, Plato (through Socrates) only recommended music and gymnastics, not dance. I don't remember his stance on wrestling.
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Tangent but, I am quite suspicious of ideas that fit into the;
"{Unrelated activity} is actually better for preparing for {activity} than {related activity} because {philosophical reasons}" mold.
And I am suspicious of it because I am actually quite good (99.99 percentile) in a specific game and I got good by grinding at that game relentlessly. And every other person who was good at that game did the same, they grinned on that game for 12 hours a day. And this is what almost literally every other person good at the game does.
It's not that the idea is without merit. It's quite idealistic and romantic that the best warrior is actually the best dancer. My (experienced) priors say otherwise, that is all. Were any of the potential philosophers who might have made that quote actually good generals?
And said advice does apply to beginners who lack lack some kind of intuition that can be trained easier in some other sort of activity. But I don't think it applies to people who are actually good at what they do. A fighter might benefit from studying a different martial art than the one he knows, but he damn well won't become a better fighter because he knows how dance.. How different of an activity dancing is from fighting is up for debate. But you get my point.
Fair enough!
Your objections to this are actually hilariously off-base. Taking the second first
Thalatta, Thalatta! Xenophon* is on the shortlist for greatest general in classical antiquity**. If you have never read the Anabasis you should, but at least watch The Warriors it's just as good. Xenophon was elected to command of a group of 30,000 Greek mercenaries, trapped in hostile Persia after the side that hired them lost the civil war they were hired to fight in before they could arrive. He lead them in a fighting march across hundreds of miles, facing enemies on all sides, with no home base. He knew warfare about as well as anyone could.
I assume because you said "Game" rather than "sport" you're talking about something in the Vidya or Chess range? Yeah, physical sports just don't work like that. You can't just make the same explosive movement over and over all day. You'd end up with overuse injuries, you'd overtrain and retard physical progress, and you'd fatigue yourself and practice shittier and shittier reps of precision movements. And in a contact sport (phalanx warfare is the ultimate contact sport), you can't train full speed often at all without injuries. We still aren't really sure what Phalanx fighting looked like, but we can look at analogues.*** Taking the Medieval Tournament, a scrimmage in terms of battle, and fatalities were constant whatever the precautions. You simply can't do very much fighting when you're training for fighting, so you have to do other things to build your skills. Professional fighters today spar only a few hours a day, a couple times a week. NFL teams practice full contact only once a week. It's not practical to "grind" away at fighting 12 hours a day.
But, my use of the quote was some rhetorical sleight of hand. It's likely that the "dancing" Xenophon referenced was more like the single-sex group dances common at traditional celebrations. Less Dirty Dancing and more like a college Bhangra competition or a high school colorguard. And Phalanx combat was notoriously more about group coordination than about individual strength or courage or prowess. So almost nothing would train you for that better than practicing high speed complex coordination among pretty much the same guys who would stand in the phalanx next to you because the Polis isn't that big. So Xenophon's/Socrates' point is actually pretty mundane mechanics of the phalanx: Coordination is more important than individual strength or daring.
*I'm skeptical that we can really say much about Socrates, there is the Platonic Socrates and Xenophon's Socrates, in addition to The Clouds Socrates and some likely false but more contemporary than us interpolations. Socrates himself was noted as a hardy and stoic, but not extraordinarily athletic, soldier.
**It's reasonable to discount Xenophon because he was his own best publicist, as was Julius Caesar (Alexander paid his professionals). If we're going by that though, Hannibal is the clear winner. Not only was his history written by his enemies, his entire culture was wiped out before his body was cold. Still gets the rep for GOAT.
***If I were a mad scientist in Mengele mold, I'd force prisoners to attempt some pre-modern fighting methods, for the purpose of simulating how it would have actually gone. Of course, a phalanx on phalanx fight would require minimum 128 prisoners for two 8x8s
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Unfortunately with war, especially in ancient times, you can't just 'grind' your way to victory. Sure you can practice sword fighting etc, but the ancient Greek city-states especially knew that those types of practices were nothing similar to the actual brutal reality of war.
Dancing can give you quite a few important skills when it comes to the ancient style of fighting. You have to learn to keep a solid center of gravity and understanding of where you need to step to contort your body in certain ways. This could directly translate to if you need to move quickly or get knocked off balance in a battle, and is not easy to simulate in sparring
You also have to learn what's called 'floorcraft,' or situational awareness of where people are around you to avoid bumping into them. Again something that isn't obvious when sparring or necessarily easy to recreate in a sparring environment.
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This poster literally says “I’m open to basically anything.”
I’m also confused as to why and how partner dance is female coded for you. With strict leading and following roles I’ve actually found it to be a lot less woke and full of stereotypically ‘masculine’ men.
Have you tried to be more open to experiencing new things? It can make life a lot more enjoyable.
Well the OP asked about meeting "likeminded people" and I am talking about how dancing gets suggested to men looking to meet women. This is the first time I am seeing someone suggest dancing for meeting "likeminded people". And I am scratching my head a bit on this recommendation; Given that I don't think dancing selects for any type of ideology or worldview, maybe extravertednesss ?
Yes. Doing it continuously. Unfortunately my intuitions turn out to be true more often than not. My personal experience is that if some activity is in my "I'm going to hate it" bucket; Often times I don't hate it, but I don't particularly enjoy it either. On the flip side "I might like it" activities are ones that I do actually enjoy a whole lot.
I am differentiating not neutral-bad, but neutral-good.
Sorry to hear you haven't found things you enjoy. Maybe I was a bit too harsh in my reply, I find people write off dancing too quickly.
Sure dancing can be good for meeting women, but honestly I think it's just an excellent hobby. You get to meet interesting, relatively wealthy, and driven people. You can indulge your creativity while also memorizing patterns, and partner dance with repeatable figures really does reward practice and an understanding of timing/direction which many engineering or systematizing folks can be very good at. On top of all this you get a workout, and you meet people.
Hell if you're super competitive you can even start competing relatively easily, if you have the money.
Even though the OP specifies meeting likeminded people, I think what most lonely men need overall is just a group or community to regularly spend time with. Dancing helped me with that even after trying dozens of other activities and not liking any of them.
Eh, I think this is true only to an extent. I think spending time with a group or community that happens to radically differ from you in ideology and outlook, and speaks continuously about that ideology and outlook, can slowly drive you nuts. And I've noticed that there's a large group of people who treat politics as basically unavoidable and think of their beliefs as if it should be the default Good Person mode of thinking, so they usually never shut up about it and often don't even bother to try and introduce any balance to their view whatsoever.
I'm not saying one should create an echo chamber and only expose themselves to people who agree with them, but from experience I will say it's also probably a bad idea to throw yourself into spaces populated primarily by members of your outgroup and expect yourself to have a fantastic time.
I agree, I think baked into the idea of community is the idea that you respect and enjoy the company of the people around you.
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Good to hear that it worked out for you.
I agree, on paper its a great activity. (IMO) With the caveat being, for the ring kind of person.
I mean you mention selecting for extraverted persons, I feel like pretty much any gathering or hobby meet up will select for extraversion right?
Like being an introvert trying to find people to hang out with you're going to have to learn some extraversion.
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While I mostly share your feelings, some more classic(?) styles of dance like swing or line dancing can be laid back and fun, more of an opportunity for everyone to get together and have a good time rather than a status competition.
Yep. Same with contra which is a lot more family friendly and designed to be easy for newcomers.
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