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Wellness Wednesday for January 11, 2023

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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I see this sentiment often enough and I feel like there's a few places you can deconstruct this to possibly understand what's behind the feeling a little better.

"Protagonist" is obviously a term for a character in a story and doesn't really have an exact analog to actual real life. A story is a construction, and a protagonist is basically a post-hoc analysis of story structure, which refers to one or often more central characters the story focuses on.

So using that analysis I don't see why we "should" feel like it should be ideal to identify with this structural trope more or less. A novel is built around protagonists to fulfill its structural and thematic needs. The protagonist construct in itself does not have a moral valence, and there's no inherent reason one should strive to identify ourself with this construct.

And regarding being part of history, it's similarly comparing stories we tell to lives that are lived. It's not the same exact thing, and we all know that historical acts tend to be consolidated into much fewer lives when told as a story, and every movie or TV show will simplify and reduce these characters even further.

I think what has happened is basically that our culture, by being so story-focused, has failed us in preparing for what we should expect from our lives and the effect we have on the world, and what satisfaction we should take. At the same time we've seemingly lost perspective on how many people we are able to reach. 800 people have viewed this thread as I write this, and a good portion have presumably read your comment. That kind of reach with the accessibility we have is pretty historically profound. So I think a solution to this kind of malaise can be a combination of rejecting that our lives must look like the stories we read, while at the same time finding satisfaction in the actually pretty profound reach and influence we all have that is often invisible or veiled by our very high expectations.

Yes, I have and still do oftentimes. If it's anything like my case, it's dissociation. Everything looks like some kind of stage or simulation and I just happen to be there, at the mercy of whatever happens. I have come to learn that it's a result of too much stress.

Is it like that in your case, or a different experience?

Relative to history, we're all just spectators. Most of it is far beyond our cognizance, one way or another, and what little isn't is largely beyond our powers to influence anyways.

As for our own lives...yeah I do, but that's because I maneuvered myself into an impasse and I'm unwilling to make the sacrifices required to get out of it. Nothing to do but ride it out and die, and see what happens along the way. Nothing worth seeing, I suspect.

Sorry to hear you're feeling that way. Sounds like a miserable way to live. I don't know much about you or what you're into and this might not work for you. But personally I would ask myself what I really want. And listen to yourself truthfully and honestly, write about it in a private journal where no one else will ever read it. Come up with the most outlandish things that you can think of. And then ask yourself if it's possible to do it. Or see if you can take a day pretending to do that thing and live that life you wish you were living, instead of this spectator life you're living now. I went through many years of my life feeling disgusted with myself and my situation, but finally being able to lead myself out of it by being honest with myself about what I want, and having the dignity and self respect to provide it for myself, helped me be able to feel more in control of my own life and I'm much happier now than I used to be. Have the courage to stick up for yourself and not be bullied by the way you think others want you to live your life.