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).
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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'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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