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Wellness Wednesday for June 25, 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).

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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.