site banner
PaperclipPerfector  13hr ago (text post)   566 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for June 18, 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).

Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I need some advice; I thought about making an alt and really getting my feelings out, but the more I thought about my problems, the less bad they seemed, somehow, once I accepted that something had to change, and it might turn out to be drastic.

I graduated with a bachelor's degree as a computer science major a couple years ago and got a job relatively in my field a few months after graduating: a programming job locally working with embedded systems. It does not pay a lot ($49k a year before taxes) and not much is expected of me, leaving my mind wandering frequently. I never actually figured out the assembly of the things, but programming them was easy enough. Some of the systems are in C, and some of the systems are in Python and PHP and also some C that I don't have to mess with much. Features are sometimes added, but for the strictly C systems, there's this big directory of code for many specific systems, some of them with very minor changes, and a lot of the time, the task is just to add a feature to a system that was already in another system, making the additions pretty simple. I don't feel like a real programmer. There is an HSA and a "parachute" healthcare plan, but no 401k. Very casual attitude. My boss is a bitch and he's difficult to talk to sometimes because of how petty he is, but he can't program worth a damn and he actually does have some good qualities to him. My commute is approximately 43 minutes, meaning I'm driving for an hour and twenty minutes every workday, and I am doing this because I live at home still with my mother. I work in a small town. I am in my late 20s. I have all my student loans paid off and I have $21k in the bank. I don't have any index funds or savings accounts or anything.

It's honestly not bad money, but there is not really room to grow. The plan was to work here for a bit and get some experience, then join the industry proper, but... well, I feel like I suck at programming, and the industry is shrinking, and I don't know if there will even be an industry, a proper pipeline, in a couple of years. I am really reluctant to start job searching for these reasons.

Given all these facts, I am a little lost on where to direct my life from now on. I'm going to list every option I have thought of so far:

  • Move out to be a lot closer to my job. Actually not the worst idea, now that I think about it. It's okay money for a single man, but I would be giving up the career. To be honest, careers seem like they're opposed to human life. Endless competition and bureaucracy, all for more money in an increasingly high cost of living area where you don't actually have a substantially improved living standard.
  • Start job searching for an actual industry job. Again, really unappealing to me. The thought of presenting such a false image of myself as someone competent is quite repulsive, and I don't know that I have enough actual accomplishments on my resume to get any chances. I almost feel worse off than when I graduated, but I actually can't say I regret my decisionmaking.
  • Do something else entirely. This thought scares me, but I've thought of
  1. Enlisting as a military linguist. The commitment is terrifying to me, and I find it hard to believe they would take me, since they have a new system to catch all your medical history and I have a suicide attempt from nearly a decade ago on my record.
  2. Trades. Every computer scientist friend I have has brought this up as an alternative (specifically plumbing and welding), and I am more than a little skeptical. People in the trades seem like they develop substance addictions at a pretty high rate, and it's hard work, and you get shit pay in your first years, and hazing from seniors and I think there's a bunch of accreditation you have to get, and your body potentially gets ruined, and to make the big bucks you have to own your own business which is a risk a lot of people won't want to take.
  3. Go back to school and get a master's degree in something. If I did this, it would be geology, I think, since you can do that anywhere and it's fun to learn about and I already got all the math I need from computer science and I actually minored in geology. I don't like the idea of going back to school, though, because it was difficult enough the first time. I got pretty sick of college since it took me a long time to get through, with a break when covid hit, and I assumed that my life would get better and the existential crises would stop once I started earning money and being useful. That didn't happen, so I guess that kind of thing is just going to stay with me no matter what I do. That knowledge would actually help bear through college again, I think.

I think I have given up on starting a family, which makes these decisions easier. I know this forum is pretty pro-natal, and I had flip-flopped on the issue for a while, but I tend to forget what abject misery feels like until I feel it again. If it's genetic, I don't want my kids to feel it. I guess I'd be open to adoption, in that case, but that's expensive.

I know the answer for what computer science majors should do now hasn't got a consensus, but any advice I can get would be very appreciated.

I feel like I suck at programming

I would investigate are you suffering from impostor syndrome or actually sucking at it.

Many real good programmers deservedly earning piles of money described themself as being absolutely terrible at it.

I didn't like applying for jobs at all in my early twenties, because they would always ask why I was the best candidate, and I would always feel stupid about how fake I was being and give up. So I put out some super lame applications, until someone in middle of nowhere Alaska called me and talked me into working there, and it was actually really interesting, even though it was not very pretty and -60 and I wasn't really teaching the kids all that well, and I spent hundreds of hours reading Edgar Rice Boroughs novels (I would not necessarily recommend Alaska, specifically, to someone prone to depression though).

Especially if you're American, a young man who doesn't necessarily want a family or retirement can just go do something that's interesting and low pay somewhere random for a few years. Low level English teacher abroad, Americorps, Peace Corps, pineapples, contractor for a military base; whatever sounds slightly interesting.

IMO, step 1 in devising a long-term plan is figuring out your financial outlook. At what age do you expect to be able to retire in your current position vs. in your alternative scenarios? If you're in the US, you can use the Consumer Expenditure Survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics as a baseline budget (size of consumer unit by income before taxes: one person, < 15 k$/a). Plug that into a spreadsheet and add some assumptions for investment growth, inflation, and life expectancy.

If I had to be honest with you, I never really planned out retirement. I figured I'd probably work until I couldn't work anymore and then die somehow shortly afterwards, and let someone else take the money I had put into whatever funds instead of frittering it away on my own failing health. I always just wanted some way to live in a respectable way and live a relatively normal life, passion be damned, just do whatever you can tolerate.

You seem to imply in your first comment ("I have a suicide attempt from nearly a decade ago on my record"; "I tend to forget what abject misery feels like until I feel it again. If it's genetic, I don't want my kids to feel it") that you suffer from depression. As a person who contracted depression after around five and a half years of employment, I can say that my life ABSOLUTELY REVOLVES AROUND the promise of retirement and unlimited relaxation (just a year and a half away!!!), and "living a relatively normal life, passion be damned, just doing whatever I can tolerate" is impossible while my relaxation time is crippled by working.

Do the calculation! You may be pleasantly surprised at how quickly your retirement date is approaching.

I agree with you on trades. One of my friends in grad school has brother who is now an electrician. He's up every day at 5 am, comes home by 3 absolutely filthy and exhausted. Some amount of hazing, but doesn't seem to worth the money.

Have you thought about organic farming? Or alternatively transitioning to a more management role within the same industry?

Man, late 20's huh? When I graduated in 2006 my starting pay as a programmer for the company I interned with was $65,000. I moved out, paid $1200 in rent to live 5 minutes from the office, and had more money than I thought I could ever spend. I was super confident, wading into code bases and fixing difficult to find memory leaks, or converting a small C++ code base for an ArcGIS extension into C# because that's what they converted the SDK to primarily support going forward.

In 2006.

Looking at the industry in 2025, making $45,000 and being lukewarm on the actual task of programming, I'd do trades, hands down. I mean, myself, right now, with 20 years experience, making what I make, no way. Though even still, if my industry exploded enough, it's a thing I'd consider, but it would be a downgrade. But it doesn't sound like that path is open to you. Don't worry about what vices other tradesmen end up developing. Plenty of software guys have self destructive habits too. Just look at WallStreetBets.

RE: Family, never say never. Just, plan as though you might. Don't go full hedonist and spend every penny you earn, or wreck your health

Do you just feel like you suck at programming, or do you actively dislike it? You’ll get very different advice depending on your answer.

I don't actually hate it, I just find it difficult, mainly because I have gotten very good at amusing myself over the internet. I feel like I am slow to code and I do a lot of googling and a fair amount of thinking without coding when I am actually focusing on problems and not distracting myself from said problems. I don't know how much of that is normal (I suspect some, but not all, is), because I don't have any coworkers that code. I'm no hand with screwdrivers or drills, which makes me think I ought not look for another embedded systems job.

I don't know that there is much room in the industry for someone like me that has no passion for it, because hiring is getting tight and there is an oversupply of computer science graduates.

I have gotten very good at amusing myself over the internet

have you tried combating this? Leechblock? /etc/hosts ? Some other kind of filter or commitment device?

So... I'm in the Salt Lake City Area visiting a friend. She's invited me to a workshop, but was worried about doing so because multiple people she's invited before have said it's culty, and some got very upset and went no-contact.

I have not gotten to the workshop yet (that's tonight), but the half-day and ... the past half hour, that I've spent with her and her housemates has ... made it seem very likely that the Culty vibes people were getting were accurate.

Mostly though, I'm concerned about the teenager I'm sitting here listening to get stressed out by all this creepy emotional exercise stuff. She's seemed pretty stressed out the entire time I've been here, and I feel like I should be doing something about some part of this but I can't quite identify what specifically to do that would help.

Also all the dads in the house are worrying me. It is difficult to organize this into the kind of details that would get the point across. The ways people talk about feelings and conversations, the way touch is used... the way both my friend and the afore-mentioned teen hugged me when we parted at the train station last night was disturbingly intense for goodbye hugs (also I have known the younger one like 24h at this moment).

I also want to continue sneakily writing this comment because I was casually invited to sit in on my friend and the teenager's dad's emotional pressurethon and I am ever-so-slightly uncomfortable listening to this weird brute-force ... therapy? Or whatever you'd call it. Which means I'm missing most of what's being said because it feels rude to listen closely but I'm also trying to understand the situation enough to problem-solve ...

... Help?

I’m baffled by this comment and responses. What is supposed to be happening? What are ‘culty vibes’ and “creepy emotional exercise stuff “? Is it like a jim jones cult, or just an MLM, which mormons are known to have predilections for? Are hugs suspicious? I know some hippies, they always hug me and call me brother, imo it’s a nice greeting for nice people. But I will defer to the wisdom of americans, who have been spotting all kinds of cults since they came off the boat.

the way both my friend and the afore-mentioned teen hugged me when we parted at the train station last night was disturbingly intense for goodbye hugs (also I have known the younger one like 24h at this moment).

this one does not seem too suspicious to me? unless there is something extra that you omitted?

and some got very upset and went no-contact.

If multiple people went no-contact over it that seems very strong indicator of something being really wrong (either with workshop or general population, but I would bet on workshop).

And based on further description it sounds very cultish.

But I have no idea whether my expected reaction would it be helpful AT ALL.

If I would be in this situation I would probably stand up, tell them something along "it seems to be a cult and, you should rethink situation and maybe escape before it is too late" and leave. Maybe something less aggressive would be better, maybe not directed to all. But I would let people know that it seems abnormal to you, maybe they will also recognize it? Or give them signal that they are not in fact crazy that it seems weird.

I would definitely would not try to become deeper involved or rescue people, unless it was some extremely close friend/family (and even there involvement seems of dubious use).

Yeah, multiple people going no contact is very weird, even by friend in a cult standards. Perhaps they tried declaring "this seems like a cult," and everyone's feelings were hurt or something?

I don't necessarily have any specific suggestions.

If the teen needs to leave the culty environment sooner rather than later, a lot of the other options are also not great, especially if she doesn't have very strong adult skills and is not yet at least 16.

Perhaps it will become more obvious what's going on after visiting the workshop?

It does sound a bit cultish.

Why are there so many dads in the house? As a dad, I would have some significant concerns about being in a situation where my teenage daughter is living closely with other grown adult men, both for her soul and theirs.

Edit: If it helps, I would categorize myself as somewhat less normie than @George_E_Hale. But he also memorizes Shakespeare sonnets, which is noble and laudable but under no circumstances “normie” in the modern age, so now I’m starting to question his normie bonafides. 😀

A relative term, no doubt. In what I know of present company, I'm normie. Then again I'm a semi regular poster, so there's that.

My normie perspective: It definitely 100% sounds like a manipulative weirdass culty thing. Teenagers? That's minors. If it's therapeutic what's the licensing? Based on what?

Attend as you like but there is zero reason for you to make any attempt to adhere to their framing when in interaction with them (i.e at the meeting.) Be an observer and listen as closely as you want. No hugging or touching me plz, not my thing. If they don't allow or tolerate that or try to guilt you, boom, proof that it's manipulative scam. Watch for signs of incremental steps toward closer physical intimacy. This sort of bullshit is a slippery slope into sex (probably reframed as something other than sex). I'm assuming there is something desirable in the females involved who are being incorporated into this gang. Maybe just youth and vulnerability. Any teenage boys also involved? My alarms are going off.

Then do the responsible thing and (should you agree with my assessment and your current suspicion) make one of two choices:

  1. Ask the friend if she has had similar weird vibes or understands why others do, explore the why, say you do too, and suggest she extract herself from the influence of these people. Maybe she's actually into one of the people in the group, or maybe she just feels a connection she's been missing and wanting, etc. etc. Yeah we all have that, but there are other less obviously weird ways to fill that void.

  2. Manipulate her into extracting herself. (Which is in essence not much better, if better at all. But manipulation works.)

I thought of a third: Do nothing, thanks for catching up, guess you'll soon go radio silent on me as you become fully indoctrinated. Lose your friend to whatever she ends up becoming (a version of this will happen no matter what you do.) Read about it later. You can't save everyone.

I thought of a third: Do nothing, thanks for catching up, guess you'll soon go radio silent on me as you become fully indoctrinated. Lose your friend to whatever she ends up becoming (a version of this will happen no matter what you do.) Read about it later. You can't save everyone.

I would at least try to tell them what you see here. Do not expect it to work, maybe do not followup, be prepared for bad response. Do not try to rescue them. But at least let them know how it looks from outside. (at least I would be quite irritated if everyone would recognize that I am getting caught by cult and noone would tell me what they noticed)

I only included this because it is the most common scenario. A friend seems to be drinking too much? Watch him waste away and maybe mention it to a 3rd party, but don't intervene. Another friend has a bad boyfriend? It's her life, watch it unfold and pick up the pieces later, maybe. Online, people love doling out life wisdom. IRL, people keep quiet generally. I agree with you, though.

Have any of you ever memorized poems? I understand this is something that used to happen in school at least at one time, but I wonder if it died out entirely.

If so - did you find it worth doing? Or, indeed, the memorization of anything else? (Not referring in this case, to, e.g., the endless Anki decks of medical school, or all of the TCP/UDP ports for your CCNA, but rather just for fun.)

Yes. I have a thing where I memorize Shakespeare sonnets. I have no reason for doing this and it never got me laid, but I am occasionally pretentious enough to recite them. I know a few other poems as well just from repeated reading of them (usually only one and often not even all of one before everyone loses interest). I don't know what benefit it has beyond the same benefit one gets from listening to beautiful music (not catchy, not rhythmic or current , but beautiful): you have knocking around your brain some of the best things, instead of a bunch of memes, porn, etc.

Yes! I had an old-fashioned school curriculum and there was a huge emphasis on verbatim memorisation of all sorts of things including poems. From what I can tell, that’s no longer in fashion though.

Perhaps it’s useful as a generic way to exercise your memory, but I’m not sure the cramming and forgetting learning style that was encouraged was very useful for anything. I remember basically nothing of the vast amounts of information I had to regurgitate. Maybe a line or two, out of dozens of poems? I think it’s mostly a cool party trick, like memorising digits of pi.

I memorized a few poems for English classes in high school. "Eldorado" by Edgar Alan Poe, the balcony soliloquy from Romeo and Juliet, the suicide monologue from Hamlet, The Canterbury Tales prologue in the original Middle English. I've forgotten the Hamlet, but I remember the other three.

On my own, I memorized "A Verb Called Self" by Chatoyance and "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" by Rudyard Kipling.

It's a neat trick, but not very useful. A better use of your time than playing video games; a worse one than cleaning your room.

In 9th grade we had to memorize and recite a poem. As a flex, I memorized The Raven, but then my teacher said it was too long and wouldn't let me recite the whole thing.

Yes I used to memorize a lot of poems. That ended circa 2011 when I finally got a smartphone.

The longest one I still remember entirely is Tolkien's Mythopoeia. (PDF!)

Probably my favorite to recite randomly (while driving e.g.) is the Song of Eärendil, also by Tolkien. No link since I couldn't quickly find a good online version.

Lots of shorter material, mostly by Yeats. The Song of the Wandering Aengus, He Hears The Cry Of The Sedge*, and An Irish Airman foresees his Death are favorites.

Also a soft spot in my heart for An Appointment.

Could go on for a while. Having an internal library of poetry is nice for those moments when I'd otherwise be bored or simply don't want to fondle some device.

*For some reason lots of online poetry is riddled with typos which suggest bad scanning/transcription software. In this case 'unhound' should be 'unbound'. This sort of thing is extremely common.

There is a clip of Sir Laurence Olivier reciting on Dick Cavett a Shakespearean sonnet. He does it well, beautifully, but fucks up one word. No one picks up on it. I have never told anyone this but I definitely noticed. It gives an odd satisfaction.

I've memorized a lot more songs than poems, but I've memorized a few poems, and a lot more sections of poems. The ones I've memorized, I definitely found worthwhile, which is why I memorized them. Usually this is because they encapsulate some truth or insight in a way that seems most valuable to me.

Memorization usually was accomplished by repititive reading and writing.

Progress continues on my 200 snatch goal. I carved out some headroom above 130 reps. But man, it sucks getting old. First something in my mid right back tweaked the fuck out. Sprained or knotted something so fierce I could barely get out of bed the next day. Eventually stretched/massaged that out. Then something in my right shoulder hurt so fucking bad I couldn't reach behind myself to wipe my own ass with my right hand. And more or less only that movement in specific caused problems. I could actually still do tons and tons of snatches no problem. Lots of stretching and massage for that too. Both those problems have gone away and don't seem to be coming back. But now my fucking fifth metacarpal on my right hand, which I broke in my 20's, has decided to ache for days every time I do my 100+ snatch reps.

Fucking why?!

On a sadder note. We lost my cousin last month. The funeral was last week, and I found out he committed suicide. We weren't especially close growing up, but we had reconnected a few years ago, and unfortunately lost touch when I moved away. He was a good guy, struggling with what remained of a life of poor choices and core traits he couldn't reform, despite solid success breaking some of their more destructive manifestations. There was always such a tone of regret when we'd catch up, and he'd ask how the wife and kid were doing. He clearly wanted those things, he'd had chances, but he couldn't stop himself from fumbling them, badly.

I miss you cous'. I'm sorry you couldn't make it. I hope you're at peace now.

Sorry to hear that about your cousin. I find that it's hard to say much on suicide deaths. They inherently create a lot of guilt in everyone around them, and I frequently hear people say "what a selfish thing to do" or blame them in some other way. Personally, life is just really difficult, and I can't say I don't understand someone who was already having a hard time of it for a long time deciding to check out. It is too bad that he couldn't figure out a better way.

As for snatches: the kettlebell book you linked me mentioned that they tear up hands pretty bad. Is there some reason you're throwing yourself at the goal this hard? The typical test is 100 snatches in 5 minutes, isn't it? Surely there are other ways to target those muscle groups. I think you should take it easy on the snatches.

I haven't actually learned the snatch yet, but I did manage to finally figure out the clean, though I am not using it in the intended way. I clean it once and then do 5 overhead press reps. I follow the previous routine I was doing: 3 sets of overhead press (5 reps) and 3 sets of pull ups (as much as I can manage, 5 intended but I can never do more than 3 good ones) on day A, 3 sets of push ups (10 reps, 20 reps last set) and 3 sets of high pulls (10 reps, 20 reps last set) on day B. My high pull is probably not what Pavel pictured, either; swinging so close to my face scares me, so I just pick it up and pull it high with no horizontal momentum. I am sort of butchering the workouts listed in the book, but it's closer to what I actually want to do for now, so I guess I'm going to keep it. I like the kettlebell a lot.

I thought you were FiveHourMarathon while reading this, which made it surprising when I read his comment below just now.

As for snatches: the kettlebell book you linked me mentioned that they tear up hands pretty bad. Is there some reason you're throwing yourself at the goal this hard? The typical test is 100 snatches in 5 minutes, isn't it? Surely there are other ways to target those muscle groups. I think you should take it easy on the snatches.

Because I can!

Snatches can be difficult on hands. But I've refined my technique to the point where they aren't for me. Or at least drastically less so. Basically at the top when you punch through there is a moment of weightlessness. This is the easy part for most people. I've seen a lot of people do different things on the way down. Some drop it straight down, some kind of unwind around the side like they are coming down from a press but then let it keep falling. I pull my wrist out of the handle as quickly as possible, back tracking the punch through movement. It recreates the moment of weightlessness from the punch through, and saves my palms a lot of wear and tear.

You just need to work on your pull out game.

But man, it sucks getting old.

Dude, I sympathize, it feels like a constant flow of minor injuries all of a sudden. I've had trouble sticking to a workout program outside BJJ this whole year, because of near constant minor injuries leading me to abandon each exercise plan/challenge in turn. Start working squats; lower back injury. Start working kettlebells; trap injury. Start running; knees are bothering me. Get on the rower; elbows. I know I'll get a lot out of adding supplemental work to BJJ, but I can't seem to stick with anything at all.

So sorry to hear about your cousin. It's so sad when you see someone whose life is essentially tragic.

We'll have to compare notes on who's approach is better/worse. I'm just stubbornly sticking to my program, working through the injuries with extra stretching and warmup, instead of trying to change programs. Because I've more or less accepted, though I hate it, that something is gonna hurt. Avoidance of pain and injury is a myth.

I don't think we really have two different approaches. Your snatch goal is your goal, and you have to work through or around injuries to get to that. Right now, fitness wise, BJJ is my goal; everything else is an assistance exercise. I gut through soreness/injury for BJJ, but not for everything else where it might impact rolling every day I can.

The accountability mechanism right now for BJJ is very effective, I have several close friends who are about as good as I am at my gym and I can't let them get better than me and leave me behind, because right now our technique progress is huge month to month. Compared to that everything else is less important.

But at the same time, I'm conscious of the fact that I'm six or seven months into jiu jitsu as my main focus now, and it's important to keep up lifting and cardio, if only to avoid getting weaker. So I'm trying to figure it out.

So Oura has be saying that my daytime stress score has been really high since pretty much forever. Subjectively I don't know how much store I put in this metric, as it doesn't seem to be particularly responsive to any of the weekly rhythms that my other metrics seem to be responsive too. However, at the same time, it does feel like I'm stressed out/anxious all the time during the day. I'd like this to stop for probably obvious reasons: my QOL is lower, running and work performance is lower when I'm constantly in flight mode, and it also seems to be a red flag for new friends and/or romantic partners. Some things I'm thinking of trying.

  1. Limiting stimulation/internet use to 2 hrs/day outside of work hours. I do wonder if overstimulation is causing a lot of this anxiety: I'm always checking email/TheMotte/social media for new stimulation. Really cutting out porn for good can't hurt either.

  2. Scheduling less stuff at work and in life. In some ways this is much more easily said than done. I feel like I'm perpetually in a whole at work: always many presentations/experiments behind where I should be, so I over-schedule to try and catch up and then end up not actually doing what I said I was going to do and falling further behind. Same with life outside of work. This is maybe the big one to work on.

  3. Actually getting serious about meditation. Many users have suggested this on this form and I've been dragging my feet because meditation seems like another thing to try and fit into my overbooked schedule.

  4. More breaks during the work day where I actually just do nothing rather than browse the internet.

Any other thoughts TheMotte?

What makes trust the stress score rather than your own feeling? I sense a loop here, as if you are feeling stressed not from stress, but from this score. While ironic, this is the very nature of so-called biofeedback. Just a thought.

I don't think this is the reason. I only started checking the score within the past few weeks, but it's been tracking for nearly 3 years. Daytime stress has pretty much always been high, unless I am relaxing at my parent's house.

Do you think that's going to change? Stress measures (increased heart rate etc.) don't always indicate anything bad. We need that kind of thing to get through the day sometimes, unless it's debilitating. And I don't imagine things like cortisol, prolactin, etc. are measured.

But this doesn't address your question, sorry.

I guess I'm curious if I even can change it. The reason why I even would take it seriously is because subjectively since starting grad school it does seem that I've been quite stressed and not really operating at 100%.

I feel like I'm perpetually in a whole at work: always many presentations/experiments behind where I should be, so I over-schedule to try and catch up and then end up not actually doing what I said I was going to do and falling further behind.

I'm not sure how many hours you're putting in. If you're in a position with high agency, people at the company are going to continually pile work on you. I have this feeling but I've also set hard limits about the number of hours I work and delay scheduling. Two sayings:

  • "Better to whole-ass one thing than half-ass multiple things"
  • "Slow is smooth and smooth is fast"

Just start pushing out deadlines and making people get in a real queue. They'll start doing their own jobs at some point. It may not be as good as what you'd do but it'll be something.

Only that I seem to be in the same position re: stress readouts on multiple devices, but objectively without that many commitments during the day. I'm not sure if this is a personality thing (I don't think of myself as naturally high strung, but it's possible), a health thing (some long term condition I take for granted), lack of good sleep, or something else. I'm trying to do lots of running and get my <90% cardio fitness somewhere appropriate.

I don't really trust calculated/composite scores from wearables myself. But caffeine/stimulant use might be worth thinking about.

Weekly relationship advice thread go, this time I'll be the starter surprisingly.

Through an extremely unlikely chain of circumstances, last year I acquired an irregular interlocutor on one of my hobbies, shortly turned regular interlocutor, and over a ~year eventually tangled and mutated into a basically full-on long distance relationship because it turns out there are girls on the Internet, even in the most unexpected corners.

It's... not going well. Being a resigned ex-rat wizard a decade out of RL practice is setting me back a lot, and I am physically feeling my lack of social experience, recently more than ever when we are having fights nearly every day. I increasingly feel we are not speaking the same language, as it were - specifically, it turns out despite proclaiming myself a vanillachad I am really bad at displays of affection when I can't be physically present, and not only can I not make them sound natural but I can barely make them come out sometimes, because to me they always sound like empty platitudes even when I genuinely mean it, and I fear them being seen as such. My anime-protag-tier obliviousness to signals and shit is also not serving me well here, because a woman genuinely being romantically attracted to me is uh, a novel experience. As I understand there is a lot of frustration on the other side because I've been oblivious to it for a long time, and I internalized it properly very late. I can only hope it's not too late.

I sense we are approaching critical mass, and despite the repeated emotional damage (on both sides) I am determined to try and salvage this. I'm not sure how bullshit/placebo the idea of the five love languages is, but it seems like a useful heuristic here to couch what I see as my main problem - as in, me being a pretty stereotypical nerd/sperg/techie who never expected to actually have a fallible human heart. I sincerely wish to Actually Change My Mind, for reasons not limited to romantic ones, but it does not come easy even in what I consider an almost best case scenario (I genuinely wonder how she puts up with my sperg shit for this long).

How do you deal with "language" mismatches in relationships? Is it possible to learn someone's "preferred" language, or more generally properly internalize displays of affection so it comes more naturally? (e.g she obviously needs compliments and affectionate words but it doesn't come naturally to me, I'm more of a stoic/silent/protective type which doesn't translate well to LD) Is my difficulty with it a sign of autism something else, like platonic attraction, since I'm led to believe it should come naturally if you truly capital-L Love someone?

I’m gonna be real with you here. This specific relationship is probably not gonna work out. However, that doesn’t mean it was a mistake. It’s learning how to be in a relationship, and most centrally, that women can be attracted to you. I get that it’s new, but it’s probably going to keep happening, especially if you keep hanging around places with women (hopefully offline soon enough).

@FiveHourMarathon is on the money with the specifics. Women love feeling special and attended to. Something he didn’t mention, but I should, is that some women experience this in the form of a fight. This is the borderline case in a nutshell. Women who get into relationships online are fairly likely to be borderline, if not maladjusted in other ways. The pattern to watch out for is volatility. She will draw away, try to make you mad, try to make you jealous, and start a fight in some capacity. Then, after the fight, she will get much more clingy and attached. Even otherwise normal women will do this from time to time, to a minor extent, if they’re feeling understimulated or stressed in the relationship, as a sort of way of venting and then getting affection, but in borderlines this is extreme and constant.

If she has concrete things she wants out of you, and providing them makes her happier, then you’re in a good spot. If she’s impossible to satisfy, see the notes above, and bail when it gets to be too much. I hope it’s not the case, there is a very good chance that it’s just the kind of ordinary fighting that men and women get up to (note: NOT a bad thing, my now-wife and I fought a ton when we were first dating, things got way better), but it’s the kind of thing that can waste years of your life and hair off your head if not handled right.

Also, love is not really best thought of as a natural expression of deep and abiding emotions. Save that for the chicks. Love is about day-to-day duties of caring for and about another human. That means doing things that feel artificial until they become second nature. Why? Because you care about the person, and you want them to be happy. It will feel good too when you get it just right. So don’t lose hope on that front, and don’t forget to ask for what matters to you, too.

Finally, for the whole “how can she like me” thing, never forget that a woman’s heart is ever a mystery to men. Frequently to other women, and themselves, too. Even if there’s an explanation, there’s no way you could ever get it, not least because you’re not gay. (I think.) So don’t stress it. It’s just how things are sometimes.

It’s unclear if you’ve met in meatspace, much less if you’ve banged her. If you haven’t gotten culo out of the interlocution, then she’s more of a high maintainence internet penpal than a long distance girlfriend, and that might be the chief issue rather than LDR management.

My longest running still-live casual relationship is long distance and is now well past five years. We can go weeks without texting each other. Usually our communication only ramps up when we’re coordinating logistics for me visiting.

Been a while since I've dealt with an LDR, but some simple mechanical advice:

As a man, you probably only contact people when you have something to say to them, and typically only when you need something from them. You aren't contacting her just to chat and show general affection, you're contacting her to solve a problem (often one that rhymes with "she wants me to call her") or when you're horny or to organize something.

Your goal in an LDR is to tie her into your life, show her you are thinking about her, so that she doesn't feel so far away.

Send her pics of your day. Not necessarily selfies of you, but just of funny advertisements, pretty wildflowers, or traffic jams, or your workout equipment, or the sky, or a screenshot of your phone when a song is playing that "reminds you of her." She's the person you want to share these things with, and when you see them she's the person you think of, and you wish she was there.

Send her articles you read that you think she might be interested in, then discuss them. Ideally, she's interested in the same articles you would be reading anyway, but we can't all be so lucky, so be prepared to invest a little time finding articles she will like. "Hey, I saw this, what's your take?" Then throw in some lovey dovey before/after along the lines of "I'm so happy I have you, there's no one else I trust/believe/is smart enough/gets it/shares my values who I can talk about this with." Makes her feel valued, and brings you closer.

Utilize the work of others. You have trouble doing expressions of affection, but luckily there's a huge industrial complex online of people producing sappy content. There's an effectively infinite quantity of content on twitter (and probably other places) that's a picture of two cute animals, or an historical painting, or hell of two literal spoons, with the caption "us if we were..." She will like that.

Good luck my friend.

I'll go the opposite the other commenters here. I'm started being in an international LD relationship about 6 years ago. I arranged for us to meet for a week within 6 months of starting the relationship. After that, COVID made meeting again difficult, but I arranged for her to come visit me for some months regardless. We were married before she went back home. She moved in permanently with me in 2023.

It's super basic bitch pop-psych but the most important thing to remember is that venting from a woman is not a prompt for you to fix an issue and absolutely not a prompt for you to try and dedramatise the issue. It's a prompt for you to say an "empty platitude" like "oh, that sucks, I hope things gets better". It's hard because your rational brain is telling you the issues can be fixed, or that she just needs a different perspective. Vast majority of the time, this is not helpful.

The empty platitudes might feel empty to you, but if you actually love her then they are not empty if you're saying them to help her feel better.

I'm led to believe it should come naturally if you truly capital-L Love someone?

Hahahaha! No. If I were to ask any man I know in a long-term straight relationship I will get the same lament; "it's like we're talking a different language". It's a miracle humanity managed to pair bond for so long. Marriage (and serious relationships that are indistinguishable from marriages) are hard, it's not a capital L Love issue; it's a two completely different human beings with different lives, histories and wildly different brain chemistry are trying to get on the same page to act as one. Both people need to learn to at least understand the other's language, and ideally talk it at least a bit.

I am an LDR vet(unfortunately) and have to echo that getting into meatspace as a goal is key.

How much emotional damage have you all inflicted on you? I ask because my first girlfriend was sourced the same way yours was. I was in the same position. The difference was that I was ~15 years old, so the years I wasted on a sub-optimal relationship could at least be considered "below the line".

In terms of showing affection and truly feeling it, I've found it helpful to actually think about what they do for me and what is awesome about them. You can forget these things when involved with someone for a long time.

If you're struggling too much to do this, it may have less to do with aspergers and more to do with them not being great. I'd need to know more about her to give more specific help.

Long distance relationships aren't real, without a concrete plan to become a short distance relationship. Preferably you've at least traveled to meet this person already?

I made the terrible mistake of getting into a LDR as an early 20's super nerd who'd barely interacted with women, at least not successfully. The novelty of "Somebody likes me!" was nice, but actually meeting torpedo'd it so fucking hard. Granted, this was the mid 00's and things were a little bit different socio-culturally. But it turns out, the sort of woman who is desperate enough to latch onto a long distance relationship is even worse than the sort of man who does. Consider all your flaws, and reasons you can't find a real relationship near you, and understand that along axis you don't even realize exist, she's probably worse.

That said, the strategy I pursued after that might not even be available anymore, so who knows.

I generally don't think long distance relationships are good idea. We are meat-world creatures not built for constant online communication. Do you have any plans to be near this woman geographically in the near future?

Man, just got back in the gym (once a week) doing some basic compound lifts, and holy crap it feels amazing! I've been doing calisthenics for a while and kind of thought I was getting into shape, but it's crazy how much more efficient the gym is. Highly recommend for folks if you've been putting it off.

What helped for me is deciding not to commit to a whole big schedule, just going in and doing squats, bench, RDL, shoulder press, lat pull downs, and some seated rows. I can knock it all out in like ~45 mins which is nice, and doable once a week. Hopefully it's a generally balanced workout routine, I got it from Gemini so... who knows?

Reminds me of this basic lifting program I was doing as a supplement to running. 5x5 lift I think it was called. Really efficient and seemed to do a good job of injury prevention and getting me stronger. Not sure why I stopped. Maybe because it was just one more thing to add to the routine and it was getting to all be too much.

I need to rant about timesheets. I have lost so much sleep because of them, and they have done a great job in completely destroying my self esteem and imposing an unnecessary amount of mental load.

For those of you not in the know, here's a rundown of how internal budgeting in public accounting usually works: A fixed fee is quoted on the engagement letter to the client, which is ostensibly supposed to be based on the amount of time the job took during previous years. As a public accountant you have an internal hourly rate, and when you fill out your timesheet the hours you've taken on a job get multiplied by that rate. The resulting amount is called a WIP, and that is compared against the bill to see if the job was over or under budget. The percentage of hours spent that are actually billed is called "realisation".

In theory it's just meant to be a measure of the actual amount of time it takes to perform the task so people know if they're pricing properly, and if there is out-of-scope work the additional billing will be estimated based on the extra time recorded in the timesheet. In practice? It gets used as a measure of individual efficiency and will impact judgements of employee performance - which doesn't make much sense considering that employees do not get paid overtime in public accounting but are getting punished for booking their overtime because opportunity cost. To make this even more comically sadistic, you're expected to book a specific number of hours per week, and there's also yet another metric that gets used to evaluate employees: utilisation, which is the percentage of time that you actually spent doing productive work - so you can't book a lot of your work hours to admin and get away with it. The budgets, along with the utilisation requirements, often results in there being an incentive to work huge amounts of overtime and book only the normal hours (eating hours) so both realisation and utilisation can look peachy. Often these targets get put on the managers and that pressure trickles down to employees.

A new employee that doesn't really play the timesheet game will often end up with sizeable writeoffs on many of their jobs. I have a mere 1.5 years of experience in tax proper (note most tax accountants did not, in fact, study a whole lot of tax and are usually picking it all up on the job), and I can say the work that reaches you can be highly heterogenous. There's a lot of self-learning involved and a lot of time spent just doing that. In addition, you are also juggling a lot of clients and handling a good amount of client communications to the point you are expected to hound them repeatedly to respond to requests for information or to sign the tax returns you've provided them like idiot children, which means you're being split between many different tasks and you lose a lot of time because this task-switching imposes a serious mental load.

If you're confused on a technical topic you're expected to ask questions, but people are often busy enough that the answer you get is never very helpful. If you half-ass jobs due to the lack of guidance you receive, you'll receive snarky review points in your workpaper, and if you attempt to make your jobs highly technically accurate (something I did), that takes time and requires a large amount of unpaid overtime from you - but you will get penalised for it if you actually record it. Another aspect that makes this even worse is that tax and accounting software used in many firms is hilariously finicky and takes a while to sort out, which inflates actual time spent even further - but higher-ups tend to be distanced enough from such preparation that they underestimate how much time troubleshooting it actually takes. Oh also sometimes you can be within budget but underutilised through no fault of your own because the firm just does not have enough work at a certain point in the year, and be criticised for not doing enough.

In other words, timekeeping in many public accounting firms is a lose/lose/lose situation. Charge your hours and go over budget? Managers complain about blowing the budget and being inefficient. Charge your hours and come in under budget? Managers complain that your utilisation has gone to shit. Charge inaccurate hours to make sure you don't come off as inefficient or underutilised? Well the number is all fake anyway, so why track hours in the first place? Timekeeping ends up being a pointless part of the job, a metric that can be optimised for greatest manager and partner satisfaction, but provides zero actual value. You're not supposed to eat time, but you're supposed to come in under budget and if you don't you will be called in and given review points. Great. I had a complaint just yesterday that my total productive hours were higher than expected for the year and that this meant I blew budgets on jobs - which means the obvious solution is not to book any of these hours spent doing work. In my view it shouldn't matter as long as you bill enough per month - the actual billings don't change regardless of what you decide to put on the timesheet, and neither does your pay, but they treat their ridiculous metrics as Divinely Ordained Truth. Nobody will acknowledge how stupid this entire system is, and will expect you to play along.

God the culture sucks. Maybe I have a bad attitude, but I've long stopped caring about how accurate anything on my timesheet is. I'm seriously considering updating my resume, applying for a couple of jobs - in industry, not public - and handing in my two weeks notice as soon as I have another offer.

I've long stopped caring about how accurate anything on my timesheet is

sadly, this seems sole sane answer to that (based on description)

Tracking time is one of several reasons that I've never attempted to make the jump into private practice as an attorney. Living life by the 6-minute increment sounds dreadful.

I feel your pain and I while I work in a different (private) industry I have had to deal with all of these issues. Many professional fields have to deal with this.

Maybe I have a bad attitude, but I've long stopped caring about how accurate anything on my timesheet is.

This is basically where you end up. Even to the point of billing other jobs if necessary to cover the time. You get what you incentivise.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats