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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Within the past few months, there's been a fascinating change in my interactions with people. Basically, all of my life up 'til now I've held this bizarre faith in "randomness" -- that things might change forever if I only stumbled into the right person. So each time I socialized, I kindled this weird unconscious hope for this event, that "it" would finally happen, whether that be romance or finding an incredible friend, or ways to make money, and went in with no expectations. But in my mid 20's, it struck me that this line of thought is mostly bullshit. Randomness happens, but the more we experience, the more we're forced to admit that randomness's effect on our lives is (mostly) a rounding error. Some people win big, some people lose big, but overall its influence is so minuscule that you may as well ignore it entirely.
As a kid I genuinely wondered why guys in their late 20's and up had such different energy from the younger crowd. I thought it was biological, as if their emotions must have tapered off somehow, but actually they're just compartmentalizing the experience. Conversely, when I look at all the adolescents I know it's weird to see them still operating with that hope. Kinda sad, too. Because this faith in randomness might be the ultimate tool for psychological self-sabotage. Like I've got a friend who's been drinking more lately, and I want him to cut it out, but I know it's precisely because he believes in randomness and ignores the logical conclusion to his actions that he keeps going. Having this perspective really deeply transforms you as a person, it's incredible. Not to say I'm a perfectly mature adult now or anything, but it's like wiping the fog off your glasses, it helps so much.
Also sorry to make a blog post when I never post here. I just lurk, because you're all way more informed on politics than me.
I think it’s just maturing. Randomness and luck and “it won’t happen to me” thinking work until reality bites you on the nose. When you’re 16 and you don’t study for the test because you’re convinced that the results are influenced by randomness “some people get A’s without even reading the book,” it’s pretty low stakes and you likely don’t have much experience of the consequences of making that poor decision. Once you’re a senior in college, you have stakes (you have to pay to retake the class you failed, lose scholarships, lose internships) and so saying “it’s all luck, I don’t have to study” loses appeal. At the same time, once you have things to lose, the sort of childish attitude of “just randomly try things” loses appeal. Having a bad dating experience at 15 is cute. When you’re 30, you often have responsibilities and therefore need to find someone who fits into the life you already have built for yourself. You aren’t just going to randomly find someone like that in a bar or night club.
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I've come to a similar conclusion regarding many statements along the lines of "you can't fight fate/genetics/the system/[phenomenon]". Much like "randomness" among young people, i.e., the belief that they will enjoy positive outcomes independently of their actions or lack thereof, many people, and especially older people, will excuse their refusal to change their habits by appealing to some greater force that supposedly nullifies any potential efforts on their part. "You can't know that behavior X will have outcome Y!", they say. "You could make an effort to X and then Y might still foil your plans!". And sure, sometimes that's object-level correct. It seems advisable to be able to gauge somewhat to what an extent and at what cost you can influence your outcomes. But many people employ this seemingly analytical language in a completely binary fashion terminating in non-arguments that are thinly-veiled excuses to indulge in bad behavior.
Examples:
All of those statements ignore any realistic expected value in favor of just keeping on trucking as usual, by pointing at some supposed mechanism that confounds any attempts to impose one's will upon the world.
That's wild. I knew the youth (and increasingly young adults) had been brain poisoned, but I never connected it to some unfounded faith in "randomness". My parents, teachers, scout masters, basically every adult in my life in the 90's and early 00's rode my ass that "If I don't X, Y won't happen" or inversely "If you don't X, terrible Z will happen". At time it felt overly deterministic, and the example my mother always used must have been a warning passed down through the generations. "If you don't get good grades you'll grow up to be a ditch digger!" It was an anachronism in the 90's, I can scarcely imagine how it sounds now.
While I rebelled at the time as a kid, never the less I grew up and stuck to the golden path as an adult. Funny how those things happen. Life is pretty good on the path, prudently considering action and consequence, delaying gratification. A story comes up with my wife constantly where I was in this gifted program as a kid, and they had these work-study units you could do. It was a bit free form, with different levels you could advance through. But I had lost interest in about a dozen of them halfway through, and the teachers told me I couldn't start any new units until I finished the ones I had already began. I didn't want to, so I told my mom I wanted to drop out of the gifted program. She read me the riot act about finishing things I've started. So off I went, knocking out all the units I'd begun, and turns out by the end of the year I'd finished more than anyone else and got some meaningless attaboy for it.
My wife on the other hand, her parents always told her if something was hard just give up.
To this day, a difference between my wife and I is that I finish things and she doesn't. She has a stack of a dozen books she's started next to her bed, I refuse to start one book until I've finished the one I'm on. She has a half dozen hobby projects in various states of completion, I've been laboring away on a set of chairs, refusing to begin some floating bookshelves she wants until they are finished. She started refinishing the kitchen... I had to finish it so we had usable kitchen.
Sometimes I do feel like a person out of sync with my generation. You do read about a transitional or micro generation between Gen X and Millennials.
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This has nothing to do with wellness, but as a Southeast Asian, I need to urgently talk about all the war crimes Adam Ragusea committed against pad thai in this video:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=puHSU9ZaZPY
too much sugar in recipe
advocates using worcestershire sauce in pad thai
puts soy sauce in pad thai
puts ketchup in pad thai
puts ginger in pad thai
snaps rice noodles in half
boils rice noodles instead of soaking in warm water
uses what looks like extra virgin olive oil to cook everything
no tofu
puts green onions and cilantro in the dish (the only herb that goes into pad thai is garlic chives)
uses fresh chili instead of dried chili flakes
Every step is wrong. Every step. This is the first time I've come across a recipe of his I actually know something about and he fucks up everywhere.
I can't believe a certain orange-shirted YouTuber hasn't reviewed this yet, honestly.
What's wrong with using fresh chili?
It's just not typical for pad thai. Pad thai uses Thai chili flakes, which are dried chilies that have been roasted for a more smoky flavour and pounded into flakes. Fresh chill is just a bit too sharp and won't mesh so well with the overall flavour profile of the dish.
That being said, it's not the worst thing you could do to the dish and I wouldn't point it out had he not made so many mistakes.
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Two Notes on Women in BJJ
I went up to New England to visit my in laws over the weekend. While there I visited a local BJJ gym three times. It was great to get a new flow, some new partners, some different tricks thrown at me and some more success with stuff I normally can't hit. But two funny things happened:
Sunday night, after too many cocktails, we were sitting around with some of her older family members and we were chatting about the new gym I had found up there. And I was trying to explain the sport, and naturally this turned into "Show us something on Mrs. Fivehour!" So I have her get on top of me on the ground, and slap me like she's throwing punches. Then, gently and smoothly, just to demonstrate not with any force or intent to harm, I swung her into closed guard, tied up her hands, and then went for the triangle choke. I never even fully locked the triangle, I was just bringing it around to lock it in casually when she tapped as hard as she could and let out a yelp. I untangled myself and she was flabbergasted "Holy shit I couldn't breathe, oh my God, wow, that was terrifying! How did you do that? You can just do that?" I'm not particularly good, and I certainly wasn't abusing my strength, I was just playing around; but I have pretty thick hamstrings and I often catch training partners earlier in a triangle before it is "technically" closed. Everyone laughed, we talked more about it, totally normal.
That night, we go to bed, to set the scene when we're in New England at her parent's house we sleep in Lucy and Ricky style single beds next to each other. She comes over to my bed and says, hey, FiveHour, can we snuggle? I was really freaked out when you choked me earlier. She said she's looking at me differently because she suddenly realized how easily I could kill her, that just for a second the air had been completely cut off and she was terrified. She said it was like when she saw our dog murder a rabbit, and she suddenly realized the dog was capable of that, that she'd never realized I could do that to her.
Now, Mrs. FiveHour is a very strong athletic woman. I shit you not, I have seen men on the motte or similar internet forums talk about their lifts when they're doing Starting Strength who were months in and still squatting less than her. And we lift together so she knows I can knock out deadlifts that are better than twice hers. But still, she wasn't ready for just how easy it was for me.
Point for those who claim that the male-female gender gap isn't sufficiently understood by most people.
On the other hand, Monday morning I went to the gym, and I rolled with everyone at the new gym, and I tried not to be overly aggressive because I was new. And at any gym, I basically never turn down a roll unless I'm injured. I do typically avoid the girls at my home gym, but mostly just by positioning myself away from them when everyone is pairing up, if they ask me to drill or roll I will. More of a Pence Rule thing than anything.
Well we were doing positional 2 minute rounds starting with one partner in front headlock position, and a nice young woman about eight inches shorter and eighty pounds lighter than me asked me to roll with her. I let her get the front headlock, and I probably let her get it in a little deeper before we started than I would have let a man. And I tried to avoid using any muscle or weight, just flowing through the moves and trying to use good technique, letting her work. And the little bitch managed to tap me out. I gave her too much slack and she hanged me with it. It's the first time I've been tapped by a woman, and for several seconds I couldn't believe it. She got me in a perfect front headlock strangle, and there was no way I was getting out of it without trying something desperate and more likely to injure someone than escape smoothly. And anyway, she had earned it, she had the strangle on tight, and I tapped. She was the only one to tap me that practice.
So on the other hand, that was humbling, a point for women in the battle of the sexes: there is a point at which a woman can submit me, if I'm not at least a little careful.
I've actually started, when rolling with partners who are much smaller/weaker/estrogenic, listening to one of the coaches and once we are in contact on the ground in guard, I'll close my eyes and try to flow roll without looking, trying to feel their bodyweight shifting and reacting to mine. I'm not sure if it has "helped," but it is a really neat experience.
I went to a HEMA tournament a few weeks ago. It was peak hayfever season, I was keeping myself somewhat functional with an ample supply of antihistamines and complementary coffee, I had barely slept, but there I went to compete, I cannot do otherwise. I ended up in a pool that contained the following types of fencers:
1 and 2 made short work of me. I got a few sloppy hits in, but otherwise got justly dismantled.
3 turned out to be left handed, and I completely failed to adapt to that in time (I ended up having to realize that I grossly overfitted my entire fencing style to defend against strong blows from my opponent's right). We fought again in the eliminations, I tried to recall my best anti-lefty techniques but failed to pull them off, then just switched to maximum aggression and threw a wide variety of different attacks at him which got me a lot further, but but my opponent used his superior mobility to get safe hits in and retreat.
4 did exactly what he did in every fight so far, going in hard and fast to push me out of the ring - I saw it coming and tried to use his momentum to push him out instead, but fumbled it. From then on I used what worked against him in the past, kept him at a distance and hit his exposed extremities. No pretty fighting, but it worked, I won that one.
6 had previously gotten absolutely pounded by 4, who won the match by repeatedly going in close and grappling her with little resistance. I fought 6 last in the pool, and was by then thoroughly exhausted. I first scored by doing what 4 had done to her, went in close, grabbed her right arm with my left and just gave her a one-handed bonk on the helmet. I could have probably repeated that a few more times, too, but instead I wanted to do better and tried to outfence her at medium distance, which just turned into silly sword-waving on both gassed-out sides. She ended up winning that one by pushing herself and paying actual attention in the end, while I was just phoning it in out of fatigue.
First time I lost against a woman in a swordfight!
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Isn't the whole point of martial arts (at least some technical ones, like BJJ) to make this possible? I mean, if it were all Grogg smash and whoever has the best muscle wins and there's no possibility of the weaker partner to prevail at least sometimes at some point, then what would be the point of learning all those intricate techniques instead of just hitting the gym and eating the proteins or whatever is the recommended way of getting more Grogg smash in.
Surely, strength matters, so if you'd lose to a much weaker opponent all the time, you're probably doing something wrong (or they are extremely good). But getting it once in a while, when you didn't play full strength, by a choke (which - I don't practice BJJ but I can assume - is not supposed to be a strength-against-strength thing) is IMHO not very surprising.
It's not very surprising in an intellectual sense but it surprised me.
Up until now I hadn't found that point of no return where a girl could get me. I wasn't totally sure it existed.
It's like one's first hangover: oh THAT is the amount of alcohol I have to drink to get hungover.
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Nothing wrong with a girl having a front headlock, it's a bad position nowadays as wrestlers are better at front headlocks than submission guys. Sometimes going too light makes your game worse wherein you end up caring about technical details more than you should.
I personally hated being in a front headlock, it's one of the worst positions out there. Plenty of good wrestlers use front headlocks like submission guys use a guillotine to make you shoot less. A good guy to study on this topic would be Luke Rockhold as his entire game was built in chewing up wrestlers with wrestling and enough submission threats honed specifically to beat wrestlers.
Women have no clue the difference between strength of the sexes. Someone who's proficient at basic subs whilst already strong might as well wear a cape. I never got tapped out by front headlocks. It's a terrible place since it's more cranking than choking I guess. Craig Jones, world's second best grappler ever and bali loving degenerate taps out the moment he goes to a new gym so that people don't get egos involved. The front headlock thing is a new thing, we don't have much of an idea of these positions the way a wrestler would.
I have no idea what anything you just said had to do with anything I was talking about in this post, bro.
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Two points
and
seem to be illustrative here. Now I know nothing about BJJ and I expect I'd be out squatted by Mrs. 5hr. But in my experience, at least in cases where there is clearly a size difference (as you describe), the woman gets the advantage from the tenderheartedness (for lack of a better term) on the part of the man. There's no way around that I think unless you just turn that off (which I don't know how to do short of rage, which is unhelpful). Closing your eyes is probably instructive in a sort of Obi Wan way, but I suspect hobbles you as you lose an important sense. Interesting though.
I mean yes, I was handicapping myself significantly. Which is actually true in like 1/4-1/3 of the rounds I spar most days, I'm a large man and there are a limited number of opponents that I can go 100% against, and then even the ones I could go 100% against often choose to go light. I go light against smaller men, though less so than I do against a woman, and I go easy on people less experienced than me, though there aren't a ton of those, and I roll light with guys who want to roll light due to injury or to work on something. I've miscalculated against new guys before and gotten tapped out for my trouble. But never against a woman!
This is entirely a case of me underestimating her ability and overshooting the amount I had to handicap myself in order to have a productive round with her. But that's still me discovering something, in that up to this point I wasn't entirely sure there existed a point at which I would have handicapped myself too much to escape from a woman's submission hold. She had that sucker sunk, there was no way I was going to be confident in getting out of it. Which genuinely, I couldn't believe, I sat there (not) breathing for a couple seconds just sort of stunned before I tapped. Because up until this point while I occasionally let a girl get a dominant position, if I turned up the strength slightly I easily found my way out of it. But there's some point of advantage at which that would no longer hold. This was a discovery.
Unfortunately, up until now I've only rolled with women who I was close to even with in technical skill. I hope at some point to have the opportunity to roll with a female opponent with a significant experience/technique advantage over me, so I can fill out that quadrant of the square. Obviously strength is good, but I get tapped by guys I am bigger/stronger than regularly. What margin of experience would be enough to worry about? I'm pretty sure I couldn't take Adele Fornarino, but where does the line sit?
Also, closing your eyes is useful when rolling in that it trains you to grapple by feel. When you're locked up on the ground in guard, there's a lot of stuff you can't see because it's behind you or because the motion is too small to really perceive a difference, but that makes a big difference. I can't necessarily tell what my opponent's hands are doing behind my back, or how his weight is distributed between his legs, with my eyes. But I can feel it, and if I can learn to feel it and react to it that's more information I'm gathering.
I actually managed to hit a few sweeps and one triangle choke on other full grown men with my eyes closed. Which, among other things, allowed me to talk shit on them about beating them with my eyes closed.
I'm only conversant in aikido, which is more like action yoga or something. In that, I've been thrown (usually into a subsequent roll) by guys who were very skilled, and also brutally slammed into the mat by guys who seemed to be channeling a different martial art. At my size (about 177cm, 73 kg) there are women who are both taller and heavier (fewer in Japan) of course. The very skilled akiidoka can move you (me) even if I resist, male or female. The regular rando is like an unbalanced sack of oranges. Reading your updates makes me want to try BJJ though the prospect of abject humiliation is always mildly daunting.
I'm 185cm and 100+kg (yes, I know, sigh) and I've been doing Aikido for a while, and I've seen women than could unbalance me reliably. If they know what they are doing, it's definitely possible, and strength has very little to do with it, more speed and precision. Of course, BJJ has very different modality, Aikido techniques usually end where BJJ is beginning :) And yes, somebody who did not practice maintaining balance is usually really easy to unbalance and really uncomfortable when the balance is broken - it's one of the challenges when working with novices, they do weirdest things when the balance is gone.
I don't think "humiliation" should be a part of it. I mean, if you didn't do BJJ what you expect to happen when you come to the practice first? Of course everybody would be better than you - I mean, if they aren't, you should seek another place to practice, since here people obviously are wasting their time! So, there's nothing humiliating in it - it's like if you tried to learn Japanese and discovered after a week you are not good at it yet. If you practiced for 10 years and kept losing to everybody, that'd be humiliating. But as a beginner, literally nothing - at least nothing related to not being good in BJJ - should be humiliating.
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An older dude who used to do Aikido joined recently, and I will say he definitely learned something in the way of balance and body positioning from his aikido practice, he's very tough to off balance and he's got strong resistance. But at times he is a little goofy with his technical choices.
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