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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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.
Both. My parents are flawed people with some good in them. I have a good relationship with my father, and try to retain a good relationship with my mother, despite having a lot of memories of what I would describe as serious narcissism and controlling behaviour from her directed towards many members of the family (particularly towards my dad, who is probably the most loyal person I know of). At one point it was very difficult for me to talk to her without experiencing a visceral disgust reaction, and I often consciously try to avoid acting like how she did when I was growing up. My politics are also probably the opposite to what hers was then.
Probably the biggest failing they had was anything even remotely relating to academic achievement. They had such a focus on academics that I failed to learn other essential life skills because of just how much stress was placed on it. I was expected to study an undergraduate degree in a subject I really had no interest in at the ripe old age of 12, and getting anything below the very highest grades was treated as failure (upon which point my mother would lose her shit and scream her head off for three hours). The thought of this induced nothing short of primal fear in me, and eventually during a particularly stressful period I ended up developing a chronic inflammatory disorder that resulted in constant, unremitting pain and discomfort.
Even long after I have gotten that degree, after I have recovered from my health issue, after I have progressed on to bigger things, I still think about that whole period of life and shudder. It's all too easy for an attempt to foster an environment that creates excellence to slowly slip into an attempt at forcing one's wishes through, and while I think the former is beneficial, the latter certainly isn't. If I ever found myself taking care of a small human, I would definitely try to do the opposite of all that.
But they had a lot of good values I still try to hold onto. Taught me to avoid substances as much as possible (something I notice a lot of western people are fairly laissez-faire about and which has always weirded me out), taught me how to save and invest, taught me the value of delayed gratification, taught me the value of self-reliance, and so on. My dad is probably also partially responsible for fostering a love of travel and photography that has persisted until the modern day, either that or I'm inherently more similar to him in more ways than I would care to admit. I wouldn't say I try to make them proud anymore and if anything have tried not to care about that, but I do try to live up to certain values they instilled in me.
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