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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Need to get this off my chest: I got a promotion, a pay rise, and a bonus on Thursday. My manager has apparently stated that I am "very intelligent" (though also need to spend less time trying to get things perfect).
I'm currently up at 3AM feeling nothing but panic.
I've never thought of myself as particularly smart, in spite of protestations to the contrary. I get the sense that I compensate for my general lack of mental acuity by just investing a lot of time trying to understand things. And I fear that the higher I go, the more that's going to show. Instead of feeling accomplished or happy, I instead get the urge to hammer needles underneath my fingernails one by one because of just how guilty I feel about it.
Frankly I don't even feel like I possess basic competence, and view a lot of my life as a protracted process of failing upwards. The more things happen for me, the more I feel like a charlatan, and the more I think I'm going to mess up and everything is going to come crashing down in one way or another.
Anyway, back to trying not to think about it.
hahaha welcome to imposter syndrome sucker!
but no really, overindexing on all of the ways you think you suck and how crazy your brain is is generally a sign of intelligence and competence
not that you'll believe any of this
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My situation is marginally different, but I find myself in a similar boat. After a decade post-graduation of slumming it at an overpaid service industry gig (owner's crony/top driver at a locally-owned doordash clone) because I was too lazy to job hunt followed by a year of going broke in a low-paying blue collar job I was fortunate enough to luck into an office job at a trucking company (thanks to having gotten to know my current boss at my side job as a bartender) that's simultaneously the highest-paying and easiest job I've ever had.
I feel like I'm in some kind of twilight zone where I get paid lower-middle class money to do nothing. I maybe do five solid hours of work a week in the office and my boss is happy with me, and his boss with him. It's a small satellite terminal and I feel like there's enough work for maybe 1.25 people, so I got hired to do some background stuff that my boss finds unpleasant and be his buddy. I was warned by the upper managers who hired me that the slow learning pace would be frustrating and it is, not because I'm struggling to grasp what I'm doing but because I'm asked to do so little and feel like I'm going to get fired because I barely do anything. But hey, my boss is scrolling on his phone/watching TV/shopping online almost as much as I'm scrolling Twitter or reading a novel on my phone, so we're even? I get texts from him about how I've been a blessing in his life. The most important thing I accomplished this week was fixing my boss's refrigerator at his house (I got lucky, the problem wound up being a $10 temperature controller, and it took me about an hour to replace.).
Oh man. In contrast, I'm constantly juggling the work of multiple clients and find myself exhausted at the end of virtually every work week, yet I still get the sense that I'm not doing enough/working fast enough/taking on as many new jobs as I should. I'm a tax accountant, and this is annoyingly detail-oriented work where even the smallest slip-up can get the tax office on your ass and negatively impact a client (even when the problem was caused by the tax office themselves in the first place, yes they fucking suck and I could write a whole essay about how shit they are), and where the regulatory landscape constantly changes. The staff are assigned production targets to meet, and whether one can do so or not hugely impacts on evaluations of their performance. Towards the end of the week I find my ability to concentrate crashes into the shitter; one can only maintain tip-top executive function for so long, and mine wasn't extremely good in the first place.
The kind of people this job attracts are of a certain breed. My manager recently had to rush over to China because her grandmother was dying of cancer, and even when she was on leave there she was still responding to work emails every now and then. I don't think I'm cut out for this level of grind in a job, and as a result constantly feel like I'm going to get fired. I spend the weekend not working on hobbies or doing anything I actually like but just recovering, or doing some extra work that I don't record on my timesheet in order to make my efficiency look better (then struggling through the following work week while cursing my life). My hobbies have fallen by the wayside, I don't read nearly as much, and my engagement on TheMotte has nosedived as a result. I wish my job was more chill.
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