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.
No email address required.
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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.
I feel this strongly, and wish we had more leisure in society. At the least U.S. Seems criminal to me that we've gained so much in material wealth, and yet our lives are more crammed than ever.
I'm also a bit insecure compared to my partner who is far more competent at a lot of things. I mostly just don't enjoy my work, and have dealt with chronic health problems, so I worry about losing the ability to make money and live the life I want to. Ultimately I'd love to quit my career and do something more creative, but I despair that I may never get there. Financial Independence is a ridiculously difficult hill to climb, at least for me.
Envy also eats at me. I have been meaning to get into Girard's theories on desire, but I've noticed as I've aged I become more and more covetous and envious of the people around me. Even though I have always disdained 'Keeping up with the Joneses,' or appearances or however you want to phrase it, status and the respect of my peers has become far more important over time.
Despite the fact that I'm closer to my thirties than twenties, I feel like I have a lot of maturing to do. Mostly in stress-regulating and keeping normal habits. I find it difficult to keep up with the amount of conscientiousness needed for someone in the upper-middle class in our society - clean house, social obligations, interesting/fulfilling career, etc.
Agree that they're all minor in the grand scheme, and I appreciate the sentiment. I wish you luck in the next year.
I've heard of Girard but I'm uneducated on the topic, is there a good primer out there? Status envy can be so destructive, and we can always diagnose it in others easier than we see it in ourselves. I'm vaguely suspicious that a lot of my affectations are obscure flexes that only make sense in my own brain; but I'm glad I missed a lot of the ones my friends have fallen for in housing or careers.
I asked the same question about Girard on here a while back, only response I got was to look into Wanting by Luke Burgis. He was on a podcast I’m familiar with and he got me interested so I should probably get to that.
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