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Wellness Wednesday for November 2, 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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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.

Try partner dance like East coast or west coast swing.

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.

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.