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.
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.
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.
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!
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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