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.
Oh, boy.
I am bad at maintaining relationships. Somehow I can't get myself to keep in touch with relatives and friends. The war has made me acutely aware that it's wrong, that it's everyone's last best safety net, but I still prefer to procrastinate instead of writing a "hi how r u" or giving a call.
I feel like my career path has been derailed. I am an awesome tech lead, a passable engineering manager, last year I switched jobs to lean harder into the managerial side and got a very nice raise out of it, but now I wonder if I shouldn't have stayed an IC ten years ago. I would've been an awesome dev with a solid set of hard skills and a much more straightforward path out of Russia.
Finally, I am worried about my legacy. I am old enough to realize that my descendants will be the only lasting mark, and right now I have nothing to brag about. Just when my special needs son grew old enough not to require too much from my wife and we agreed to try again, the war started. I'm afraid that by the time we properly settle down in another country and can afford a second child we will be well into our forties, not the ideal age to have children, especially when we've already had one misfire.
I identify with this so strongly. I wish I was half as good at motivating myself to keep up with everyone's birthdays as I was to keep up with the latest in internet drama.
I should buy a Dutch toilet calendar to force myself to stay on top of birthdays.
Well, that was one I had to Google!
It's amazing to me that my mother-in-law, who barely understands what's going on around her at any point, has every relative and friend's birthday memorized. It has really never occurred to me to become a person who remembers birthdays, but maybe that would be a nice thing to be!
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