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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
It wasn't exactly the same situation, but my friend had also blown through a few hundred thousand in the form of an inheritance from his parents. He'd been a musician, worked various jobs (mostly in auto parts), etc. but couldn't really hold down a job after he started going down with heart failure and other health problems. Irritatingly, it's my understanding that some combination of having had a low on-paper income and having waited too long to apply for disability after he quit working (while subsisting on the inheritance) meant that he didn't have enough work credits to qualify. I don't know the exact details (Maybe he got denied initially and then ran out of work credits by the time his health was sufficiently bad.) but it was maddening to me because he was clearly unable to physically cope with any sort of labor or consistently show up because he'd have days he just couldn't do anything. You could get mad that he didn't do anything to help himself in terms of managing his health problems or maybe argue that he could've tried harder to get a work from home job but he didn't have a work history conducive to that and wasn't self-motivated enough to make it as a gig driver (Anyone can drive a car in circles, but doing so without crashing it and keeping it in good condition to use it for work actually takes some skill, and in my experience from that business a lot of people can't make themselves work enough to pay the bills without the fear of being fired.).
He'd lived hard in the small-time rock and roll scene, wound up with old people problems before his time, and most of his social circle from the good times had either died or aged out and moved on from that life. It really was sad and I felt bad because his life objectively sucked in a way that would've been hard for the best of us to cope with. It was just beyond his means.
There isn't really anything you can tell your friend that he doesn't already know. He has to love and respect himself enough to do stop with the drugs and put up with most likely being broke working a shitty job and having a mundane life because he wants more for himself than to be a statistic. You can't make somebody care about and for themselves. He's probably looking at what feels like an overwhelming amount of effort/self-improvement for what doesn't feel like a lot of return on investment. I'm sorry about your friend, because it sucks to watch.
More options
Context Copy link