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.
To me, this is a cousin to the expression "the more I know, the more I know I don't know."
"The more I do, the more I think about other things I haven't done but should do/ want to do." The book 80,000 Hours is above-average self-help screed, but it does drive home the point that "you will accomplish an extremely small percentage of everything that is capable of being done in a human life." Bucket lists might as well all have "visit several hundred million different stars" on them. It also gets interesting as your interests and values change over time. In my 20s, I had a job that took me to interesting places all over the world. It made me feel interesting and like I had "really experienced life." Now, I am super jealous of the guys I hunt with who have been to Wyoming, Montana, Idaho with rare/expensive lottery tags in their pockets. But hey, Dubai was cool, right?
I'm of the opinion that enduring satisfaction with life really only comes from mastery and knowledge of the self. I don't mean this in some woo-woo Zen master way. I mean figuring out truths about yourself that make sense and that you don't want to change. I went hard on the personal organization kick for a while really thinking that a super-interconnected note taking and reference system would lead ... somewhere. I think, to an extent it did, but you know what I found out as well? I really like handwriting in notebooks. It's a tactile orgy for me. So, I still use the Markdown Monster I created for career related stuff, but I start each morning scribbling pre-coffee jibberish into a spiral notebook.
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