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).
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Mottizens: do you have a good relationship with your parents? More specifically: do you try to make them proud and live up to values they inculcated in you? Or do you think about failings they had, and try to orient your life toward avoiding those?
Found myself wondering about this yesterday, how in some cases you have children who strive to continue the sort of life their parents led (e.g., multigenerational families I see at church), and in other cases you get total rebellion, children who want to be as little like their parents as possible and adopt opposite positions to what they were raised with.
Thinking about my own case, it's a little bit strange in that it never felt like my parents steered me towards any particular mode of living. I try to be like my dad in certain respects: taking responsibility for things, trying to solve one's own problems with one's own resources, managing money carefully and thoughtfully. My mom is just sort of a pleasant, rather daffy woman who lives a very simple life and isn't trying to impact the world in any way. I observe that neither of them are especially opinionated, and neither am I; they are casual, moderate, Clinton-type liberals and I've gone more conservative, but it's not something we ever fight about - they don't go into arguments about "issues" and don't mind people disagreeing with them. In general it's like they're just sort in the middle of most types of bell curves; even if I were of some rebellious nature, they aren't polar enough about anything for me to take up the opposite pole.
I resent my parents' making me join a zillion stupid extracurricular activities, and don't trust them too much. I had to pester my mother for months before she finally retired on the basis of my calculations showing that she had more than enough money to do so, and even now she whines about wanting to go back to work. I like to refer to my father as "Mr. Untrustworthy" (despite my mother's admonishments), after various escapades over the years:
Using superglue on a model rocket when the instructions told us to use rubber cement
Buying a telescope and using it approximately once
Buying a motorcycle and selling it within a few months
Failing to properly execute a quitclaim deed to a house for multiple years after divorcing my mother, to the point that she had to hire a lawyer
Claiming that the word "blackmail" is racist
Texting to me links with no explanation of why I should click on them
Allegedly converting to Islam
But I can't say that my relationships with them are bad. Call them lukewarm instead.
They told me to wear polo shirts rather than T-shirts, and I have maintained that fashion. While I was homeschooled (through seventh grade), they encouraged me when I developed cool hobbies (reading voraciously, translating English to Latin, folding origami, etc.), and I have continued to develop such hobbies. They speak good English, and I certainly am thankful for that. My father is (or at least was; I don't know his current status) a six-figure bigwig, and I also managed to attain similar exaltation.
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