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Wellness Wednesday for December 28, 2022

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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Bonfire of the Insecurities

Next week is the traditional moment for new starts, new resolutions, improving ourselves. Let’s take this moment going in to talk about all the weird little things we worry about in life. The nagging mosquitoes that prick at us when we aren’t aware. Admit, and exorcise.

— My wife is extremely successful, and I do all I can to support her, but I worry sometimes I’ll end up like a penny-ante version of one of those 19th century art adjacent women who get biographies in the NYT Book Review as the muse and aide to a famous artist but her own works are all lost. I love her for who she is and I’m proud of her and I want her to be great at what she does, but in some circles I’m already more Mrs. FiveHour’s husband, even if I’m equally professionally successful in my own circles. I worry how I will succeed as a husband without compromising my self-respect in the long term.

— I’m a jack of all trades and a master of none, and I worry that I’m wasting my potential at anything through a desire to be well rounded. In general my aspiration is to be Heinlein’s Competent Man, but what if I’m just making myself universally INcompetent? I can’t stand the idea of being bad at anything, and that might keep me from ever being great at anything.

— I want to spend more time with my parents, more time with close friends, more time by myself, more time with my wife, more time with my dog, more time traveling, more time at home. Somehow there’s never enough.

— What opportunities have I missed? What will I miss if I don’t wake up and smell the coffee?

These are all absurd and minor in the grand scheme of things, but it’s what I need to be honest and acknowledge before moving forward.

If we're listing our insecurities, I've got plenty to share:

  1. Call it lassitude or simply lack of motivation, but I've never felt driven to any meaningful degree. Life has mostly been a series of taking the easy (or if not so easy, then default) course of actions for me. I didn't feel passionate about medicine, but it was both comfortably familiar and paid better than the alternatives.

That's changed to some degree, now that I've done most of what's required to escape India and practise in the UK, but it's nowhere near gone. I feel like I could hand most of my life over to an autopilot, and in fact I gladly would.

  1. I feel grossly inadequate as a doctor compared to my overachieving family. I'll never be as good a surgeon as my dad or grandpa, not that I wanted to go into that field myself. Chalk it down to ADHD or depression, but I can't lie to myself and claim I'm as good a doctor as they are, I certainly don't read journals and publications unless needed for an exam.

  2. I'm going through a quarter life crisis, prompted by a sense of deep FOMO. I see some of my friends having fun in Uni, whereas all I did and will do for the next decade or so is study when I'm not exhausted by work. And I've found someone I really like, but I still feel like I'm missing out on the wilder side of my 20s, instead of fucking around and playing the field, I'm looking at settling down sooner rather than later. I think the grass might not actually be greener, but god knows I still dream of sowing my wild oats.

  3. It's unlikely I'll be making more than solidly middle class levels of money anytime soon, I simply lack the drive for entrepreneurship, or an interest in the kinds of medical work that pays big bucks, even if UK salaries weren't ass.

  4. I'll miss my family and my dogs when I'm abroad, I barely spent 2 months outside and I was getting super homesick by the end.

Eh, I'm mostly doing ok with the hand I've been dealt. Being born in the 3rd World is no fun at all, and while the end is in sight, I feel like my life is nowhere near exciting as I once dreamt of.

I'll miss my family and my dogs when I'm abroad, I barely spent 2 months outside and I was getting super homesick by the end.

I currently live up the street from the house I grew up in, so I can't talk on this one.

If you found someone you really like, you're ahead of the game. Your anniversaries will be trumping your friends' anniversaries forever! Really, I've been with my wife for a decade, and I'm so glad that we met before we started forming baggage when I compare my life with my friends who ran around and have a couple crazy-ex-skeletons in their closets. It's a blessing, even if it can feel like a rip-off, a paraphrase of Augustine "Lord let me find someone, but not yet!"