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 am one of the lucky ones. No risk of growing up with anything but a secure attachment style. I have never had a moment when I wondered whether my parents loved me or would pick me first.
Then I went to medical school and discovered that lots of people did not have such good fortune, for all that I took it for granted. Classmates from broken homes. Friends who talk about their parents like cautious diplomats. I remember feeling almost offended on their behalf. If you cannot trust your parents to have your back, who exactly is left?
Scotland has not helped my selection bias. The proportion of intact, ordinary, quietly wholesome families in my immediate orbit feels surprisingly small. I keep wanting to file a quality improvement report for society.
As for the usual question, do I try to live up to the values my parents gave me, or do I optimize against their failings? Yes, although the first part dominates. They taught me the obvious trilogy that turns out not to be obvious in practice: work hard, be honest, treat people with respect. That is not a complicated moral philosophy, but it is a rather reliable recipe to becoming content. My parents are, like every human I've ever known, flawed people. That is not incompatible with them being good people, which they very much are. I'm lucky to have them as my parents.
Culturally I am not particularly Indian. They never treated that as a crime. They are mildly religious. I am aggressively antitheist. Everybody made peace. We have literally never argued about politics. I do not want to. If there is a place I refuse to import culture war into, it is the family group chat.
My father is the canonical example of work as a form of love. The night before a colleague in India asked him to see his granddaughter with an ovarian tumor that needed immediate surgery, so he stayed. Later last night, he did an emergency C section for his nephew’s wife. At the end of all that he still called me before sleeping. It is hard to nurse any pride in my own work ethic after that sort of data point.
Have I been a decent son? Mostly, with detours. The plan is to pay compound interest. Give them grandchildren to cuddle. Raise my kids the same way, with the understanding that the money I make and the effort I spend are more for them than for me. I will consider it a success if my children are half as fond of me as I am of my parents. If love compounds at that rate, the long run will take care of itself.
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