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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Notes -
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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