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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1380 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for September 17, 2025

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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Pediatric gender medicine came crashing home for me this week. My neighbor's youngest, older than my oldest but close, started public pre-K this month as a boy and came back this week a girl. The mother of the family seems to think the school knows best and they're both well educated and well equipped to deal with this.

I have thoughts, but I don't want to post in the culture war thread because I don't want a war here. I like my neighbors. I like their boys. But I believe this is a social contagion, and now I have thyphoid Mary living next door. I also believe that kids emulate each other.

What the hell do I do? I don't want to upset my neighbors but don't want to call him she or a girl, and I don't want them telling my kids to do that either.

As of yet, nobody has made any requests of me, but it's consuming my thoughts. I've lost friends over contentious topics recently, like the last year, and I don't want that repeating with people I see every day and can't avoid.

I've been dreading this a bit too.

My middle daughter is 4 and has been insisting for a year now that she is a boy. That she doesn't like girls or playing with them and only wants to be with boys. We've mostly surrendered on the clothing front, we buy her boys clothes and shoes, but she still has long hair. And we certainly don't introduce her as a boy.

She has been in the same daycare most of her life, and they are not the kind of place that would encourage that sort of thing. The hispanic lady that runs the place talked to me about voting for Trump because of the things the left was doing to kids in school. The pre-k she is in right now is Christian oriented and less likely to pull any funny business on this topic. Our best guess for why she does this is that she had a really good friend at the daycare that was a little boy a year older than her, and she just wanted to emulate many things about him.

But she enters kindergarten at a public school next year.

I wish I had good advice for you. The one positive thing that might be going for me is that class sizes are large and she is likely to go unnoticed.

My neighbor's youngest, older than my oldest but close, started public pre-K this month as a boy and came back this week a girl. The mother of the family seems to think the school knows best

I have nothing meaningful to add. This is just so insane to me, it is hard to believe we ended up here and normal functional people are just accepting this

I will say, it was not exactly de novo, but it is significantly more since school started.

Is it really so hard to believe?

Western society believes women are (for a variety of reasons) definitionally incapable of molesting children, and as a result we have no words to describe what it looks like when children are molested by women. Parents come up with a variety of justifications to look the other way, especially when they're part of the priesthood (churches and schools/priests and teachers are very similar in their social roles in modern times, and churches have been around sufficiently long to be present in humanity's genetic memory).

We pattern match it to "literally fucking" because of our modern pretense that men and women are the same- and in its majestic equality, the law prohibits both genders from engaging in molester behaviors overwhelmingly preferred by men [be they perpetrator or victim].

It is completely natural that the sex that receives sexual gratification from being an oppressed social token should perpetrate its sexual interference by trying to turn little boys into oppressed social tokens. This is why they believe it necessary to try and induce that identity. It's really not about encouraging the sex, it's about inculcating submissiveness to, and the sexual excitement of, being under the thumb of the patriarchy Big, Bad Men.

In this case, he most likely acted different, and different = submissive and breedable oppressed by default, so why shouldn't he be introduced to the sexual arousal that comes from being in the uniform of different? It's also absurdly heteronormative if you think about it for 5 seconds- it's just that instead of "men can't wear dresses, dresses are for women, it is not for men to wear", it's "men can't wear dresses, dresses are for women, therefore anyone who wears a dress is a woman"- but female sexuality is just as heteronormative as male sexuality is, so...

I believe this is a social contagion

But not an organic one. That one's pretty obviously top-down. That'll teach him to get along with the girls and choose the dollhouse or toy stove over the blocks and trucks in centers, I guess- or at least, it'll certainly teach him how idiot adults see those things. Certainly an important lesson, best learned early.

What the hell do I do?

Nothing, or however you'd nominally handle the general form of "but his mom lets him X and Y" if and when your kid asks why he can't be a girl too. Your way of doing that may be productive, or it may not, but that's up to you.

As for "what's he called today?", well, you'll likely be sorting that out with him directly (as will your kids, in their own way). I'm sure you have enough social grace to figure out how to confirm someone's name if you forgot. Preferably when there's nobody to answer that question for him present, of course.

I also believe that kids emulate each other.

Ah, but kids also question each other, especially if it's about something particularly unusual. You might not find the answers to those questions satisfactory, but I assure you they do eventually get asked.

I think honestly, I’d distance my family especially children from these people. You can be personally nice, but don’t let your kids hang around that family as the child is likely experiencing social contagion and his parents seem unwilling or unable to question it or do anything about it.

the child is likely experiencing social contagion

Another +1 for the "adults are all Last Thursdayists" hypothesis. I get that it's very convenient to model kids as basically unthinking robots but they do have their own motivations and internal reasons for doing things. Those reasons are usually simple enough to be trivially back-propagated but that's naturally difficult when your robot's also giving you lip.

The follow-on comment to that one kind of confirmed my suspicion. Just because he's likely pretty girly already doesn't make him a girl, for various reasons; and there's a productive and unproductive way to handle that fact.

The relevant authority figures have selected the unproductive, destructive, and selfish way to deal with that, and "being too stupid or actively going along with those things for social reasons"... well, that's what molesters do and how they work, and pulling back is likely justified on those grounds.

But it's not the kid, lol.

Just because he's likely pretty girly already doesn't make him a girl

He's not even that girly, he likes to run fast and he like big trucks and he likes adults to watch him when he does stuff and he likes watching me when I work with tools. The most I've seen prior to this was some painted nails and using backwards pronouns for himself and others. Apparently there was a meltdown at/coming home from/because of? school that had something to do with going with the other boys to the bathroom.

I just don't think the correct response is to let him wear dresses at home, and to wear his hair like a girl at school.

Apparently there was a meltdown at/coming home from/because of? school that had something to do with going with the other boys to the bathroom.

And so his authority figures, on a hair trigger for trans, see trans in every GNC behavior a 4 year old exhibits. They're in a hurry to validate it, partially because they've been told they should be, but also because having a social token is just the greatest, isn't it?

that had something to do with going with the other boys to the bathroom

What, did he decide to take a piss sitting down and the other boys made fun of him for doing that? (Or for the more obvious 'being present in the boy's bathroom while looking like a girl'[1]?) You know, opposed to the way you are Supposed to, which is to casually whip that private part out, piss all over yourself and the floor and otherwise make a big mess, and that's assuming you don't have other people actively fucking with you. I don't remember if they mount the pissers low enough to be used by a kid of that height, though maybe it doesn't matter.

using backwards pronouns for himself and others

And maybe if we didn't spend the last 15 years playing stupid social games about this, this wouldn't trigger that absurd overreaction. Yes, I'm sure a 4 year old doing that means the same thing as it does when a 24 year old does that. He's not even old enough to natively know why writing "yes" or "no such luck" in the form that asks for your "sex" is funny yet.

He's not even that girly

And yet from your description he has hair long enough to 'wear it like a girl', and is not only patient enough for someone (probably a girl he gets along with) to paint his nails, but not be troubled by what it means. Sounds pretty girly to me, and perhaps more importantly, [1]I bet it probably sounds pretty girly to the average teacher, and the average 5 year old boy.

But then, it's not like that's really a bad thing... until you put him an environment that's actively trying to "encourage him to express his true feminine identity" as a consequence. That's just plain old sexual interference, and his folks really do need to protect him from teachers who insist on doing that, because they are as incapable of policing themselves as the Church was.

There's a difference between 'I think I'll wear [girl clothes] because I feel like it today' and 'I think I'll wear [girl clothes] because it validates my identity as a girl'. (There are some sensory considerations here that will result in boys actively preferring dresses under certain conditions, so that may be less connected with some sense of gender identity than might otherwise be apparent. Of course, I would say that, wouldn't I.)

What, did he decide to take a piss sitting down and the other boys made fun of him for doing that?

My impression is that the class was doing a bathroom stop on the way back/to from some out of class activity (PE? Music?), and he was told to line up with the boys. This really upset him, although I'm not sure if it was at the time or he exploded when he got home.

And yet from your description he has hair long enough to 'wear it like a girl', and is not only patient enough for someone (probably a girl he gets along with) to paint his nails, but not be troubled by what it means.

To be fair, I had long hair until this year, and his older brother has even longer hair, never cut down his back, which he never wears like a girl. I figured that was enough to demonstrate that long hair isn't just for girls.

It's his mom who does his nails, I'm not sure there are 4 or 5 year olds I'd trust with nail polish.

Protect your family.

I'm now reasonably confident that I've conquered my pornography addiction.

I decided to take on my pornography addiction shortly after getting married. My beautiful and talented new wife fell pregnant almost immediately, and the weight of my new responsibilities led me to audit and tackle my addictions. My worst addictions were all screentime related. I was addicted to porn, social media, general scrolling, and YouTube. I was one of those zoomers who couldn't resist the soothing mind wipe of the phone. My lesser bad habits were sugar and alcohol. My overall burden of addiction was not debilitating, but I knew that I would need to improve to uphold my own standards in work and fatherhood as my life became increasingly complicated.

My porn use was approximately daily, but more frequent whenever I was suffering acutely (i.e. a nasty bout of illness, a stressful time at work, etc.). I tried quitting with willpower alone several times, but that was insufficient. Making it inaccessible was a crucial crutch.

My technical solutions:

  • I set 1.1.1.1 family as my home's DNS server, with no fallback options. This fairly effectively blocks most hardcore pornography.

  • I followed the instructions here to do the same with my phone.

  • I set up a pi-hole and adblock on all of my devices to eliminate all advertisements, which can act as bait for my bad habits.

I also set lengthy xkcd style passwords for settings for these configurations, and wrote them down on a piece of paper buried in a drawer, to make the process of undoing these configurations work-intensive.

These changes were transformative. I occasionally found myself trying to relapse. I would try to visit problematic pages reflexively without any consideration. Hitting the blank DNS blocked page always knocked me out of that loop. Now I've gone ~6 months without porn use.

I've since applied the same general strategy to cutting down my garbage screen time in general. My wife and I canceled all streaming services, and reduced our media consumption to blu-rays from the local library. Choosing the media we consume days in advance has made us much more intentional and measured in our media consumption. I also blocked sites like facebook and reddit entirely.

The last addiction that I'm still struggling with is YouTube. I really enjoy YouTube so I haven't culled it entirely, but I have mitigated its addictiveness with browser extensions like socialFocus. These extensions eliminate video thumbnails, autoplay, recommendations on the video page, short form content etc. These changes make it harder to get sucked into a viewing loop, and make hysterical content less appealing. This has reduced my YouTube viewing time, but I still want to make further progress at paring my viewing down to only top-tier content.

Now that I have my digital addictions reasonably under control, I realize just what a toll I was suffering by letting others capture so much of my attention with agit-prop, demoralization propaganda, and superstimulus. I feel like I now have a greater emotional reserve. I can absorb bad news and chaotic situations more graciously, and I am enjoying life more. I feel like it's been particularly helpful in my parenthood, because I have more time and attention for my 9-month-old, and I can more easily withstand her tantrums without getting exasperated.

Next up will be my sugar and alcohol habits. Neither of these are particularly severe, but I do use these substances habitually more than I would prefer. Ideally I'd like to contain my excessive consumption of both refined sugar and alcohol to special occasions. I'm interested in feedback from the community on how best to tackle these.

My generic advice for habits is that if you want to stop, you need to put as much friction as possible between you and the stimulus. In the case of sugar and alcohol, my advice is “win at the grocery store” meaning don’t buy things that you don’t want to be consuming. If you’re quitting alcohol, then don’t have any in your home. At minimum, that means drinking requires you to get dressed and leave home. And if eating cookies requires you to bake them yourself or having ice cream means putting on pants and getting in the car, you’re not going to do it much.

Thanks for this! I have been struggling with porn use for about 6 years (when I decided I wanted to quit), and nothing seems to have worked. The times I've been clean for longest (couple weeks at a time) were when I took drastic steps to reduce physical proximity to stimulus: banning websites on my phone/computer, reducing screen time drastically, no social media so I wouldn't see thots in my real life post slutty pictures.

Other stuff like having a girlfriend, or even becoming Catholic didn't really help kick the habit. It's heartening to see that the road to porn-free life goes through the physical realm, rather than the vague spiritual realm where a lot of my peers seems to think it resides.

Got so close to getting T-boned this morning. 4 way stop, I'd stopped, spotted a car to my right still headed to the intersection. I'm like cool I win. Start driving through the intersection. Car to my right blows through their stop sign. Is turning onto the road like I'm not already halfway through the intersection. Lay on my horn swerve to the left, narrowly dodge the car.

It happened 100 feet from my house, with my baby daughter in the back seat. Fucking asshole drivers, I might have ended up in jail today had he hit me. I am also starting to think that the minivan I was driving is cursed. It would have been the 4th accident in that vehicle in just 3 years of ownership. The other vehicle we've owned for 8 years has zero accidents.

What color is the minivan? Darker or greeny colors seem to have more accidents for obvious reasons. (Of course there are also many shitty careless drivers in the world who would blow a stop sign even if the car they were about to ram into were day-glo orange.)

Solid black, we have joked about wrapping it in caution tape to improve visibility.

I've gone on drives recently where I counted the number of other drivers I could see on the road who had their smartphone in their hand. It usually only takes me a couple of miles or so to get into the double-digits. I understand that defensive driving has always been necessary, but when I first started driving it didn't feel as much like every journey was a potential accident.

You need speed cameras that fine distracted drivers.

I understand that defensive driving has always been necessary, but when I first started driving it didn't feel as much like every journey was a potential accident.

I find driving much more tiring than I used to because instead of playing the mental game of "how might this other driver try to kill me," it's the mental game of "no, seriously, all these other drivers are trying to kill me and I have to defend against them all simultaneously." A large part is cell phone use as you note, but part of it is that it feels like there are 2x as many cars on the road as 15-20 years ago, and the percentage of non-cell-phone-using-but-still-horrible-drivers has increased.

"They're trying to kill me," Yossarian told him calmly.

"No one's trying to kill you," Clevinger cried.

"Then why are they shooting at me?" Yossarian asked.

"They're shooting at everyone," Clevinger answered. "They're trying to kill everyone."

"And what difference does that make?"

It seems as though this comment would be on-point if randomly placed anywhere in the last two threads.

Slow and steady progress at the gym. Now I can squat two plates and bench one plate. In the past week I suddenly got physical growth to match the strength gains. I feel so much more confident in general. A few pounds of muscle on my bones made a world of difference. I guess now I'll keep going and see how far I can climb this hill.

I want to do more self improvement things, but I'm running up against my time and energy budget. I'm hoping to fix my sleep soon and get more energy that way. Trying to cut down on doomscrolling, but this Charlie Kirk saga is making it hard. I've made more of an effort to talk to and dance with girls at events. No bites yet but I'm putting shots on goal.

General encouragement to all the bros and lurkers out there: There's a lot of low hanging fruit for making your life better. Find just one thing now, and you'll thank yourself in a few weeks.

Now I can squat two plates and bench one plate.

Good job! Benching 60kg x 5 was easy for me, but my fucking knees won't let me squat more than 1.5 plates, and only on a good day. I've switched to endurance training (cyclist squats on a wedge) for my knees, with a plan to add some split squats or lunges when I'm ready. I hate both.

I've switched to endurance training (cyclist squats on a wedge) for my knees, with a plan to add some split squats or lunges when I'm ready. I hate both.

I wasn't aware of cyclist squats. Interesting.

Re lunges, I'll take those (and weighted step-ups) any day over traditional squats. I blame having all my height in my legs. Lunges and step ups (and maybe cyclist squats) feel so much more functional for building strength to do all the other stuff I want to do, like running and hiking.

A few pounds of muscle on my bones made a world of difference.

There's a lot of low hanging fruit for making your life better.

People talk a lot about 'noob gains' and rapid early progress in muscle gain, but they don't talk enough about the early psychological effects of heavy resistance training on the indolent and sedentary. There's a large spike in hormones when you first start lifting that go a long way towards killing anxiety and reinforcing confidence and resilience.

Honestly its probably more impactful on male attractiveness than the physical toning itself.

Figured out how to "reduce stress" on Oura ring readings. Basically need to make sure I take computer breaks throughout the day. Post lunch time walk, computer-free lab meeting, etc. have added a lot of restorative time to my days. This seems to be correlated with how I'm feeling as well.

Still waking up every single day at 4am. Usually manage to go back to sleep with a low dose melatonin, but is still annoying. My leading hypothesis is something to do with blood sugar, am trying to eat more fat and protein. Any tips/thoughts appreciated.

Have you had sleep issues before? What's your relationship to sleep and to wakefulness (how do you feel and think about them, is there anxiety involved etc)? Is it only a waking up problem or a getting to sleep problem as well?

I had insomnia in college that I resolved with CBT. That was a falling asleep problem. I no longer have that problem at all (except when I don’t follow obvious sleep hygiene tips about stimulation before bed).

I pretty religiously track sleep, but I don’t feel that I’m anxious about it. There maybe is a feeling of frustration/annoyance when I wake up at 3/4 for the 1,000th time, but I don’t fall asleep fearing that, if that makes sense.

Why don't you stop tracking your sleep altogether? And what about wakefulness? Do you like being awake? If not, your brain will try to confront you with that "problem" and solve it. You should welcome wakefulness when you wake up, instead of trying to get away from it again. Sleepiness will return after a while, if more sleep is needed in the early morning hours.

Anyway, I recommend the book This is Natto.

The problem is when I wake up in the middle of the night, I usually am not sufficiently rested. I know I need more sleep.

I track sleep because it is a leading metric on other things: recovery from training above all. I really don't understand the skepticism towards biometrics on this forum.

You're still dodging the question of your relationship to wakefulness.

"Needing" sleep, worrying about sleep, tracking sleep and its markers... this will just problematize it further.

You should worry about increasing your internal understanding of your mind. It's the mind which produces the sleep drive and the brakes on that drive.

Read the book I recommended. It's short.

You might balk at this, but consider going a week without taking any biometrics or monitoring at all. I'd actually suggest a month or longer. From my wild and woolly point of view the currently popular idea of "optimizing" one's physical health is more like micromanaging when maybe just grooving for a bit would be more helpful. I suspect however that this suggestion does not interest you.

It's a tough line to walk, especially because as you get closer to the optimal frontier, the quality of evidence for what is "best" declines significantly, so many folks find themselves swimming in all sorts of claims about minute details, which, even if real, may only have an extremely small effect size. E.g., people nitpicking about exact timing of protein intake and its exact composition at those times. Like, sure, if you're an elite athlete and your pay may depend on whether you can eek out an extra percent here and there, maybe it's worth trying to figure it out, but it's just not for most people. It's definitely not worth the psychological hassle of trying to wade through the various claims or attempting to micromanage a signal which may not even be high-quality enough to ever capture the phenomenon you're looking for.

On the other side, there are basic things that many people just don't grok until you collect their specific data from them and show it to them. For a couple examples, I've met people who simply did not truly comprehend that calories correspond noisily but directly to body weight or that alcohol messed up their sleep until it was shown to them with their own data.

Of course, it's always difficult to know which category you're in, because, well, you don't know what you don't know.

I will definitely do this November/December this year when I am not training hard. It is helpful when training to have stuff tell me when to chill out and when I can put in work.

Yeah agreed. I think biometrics do more harm than good personally.

How's your magnesium intake?

I've noticed that I have restless sleep when I get deficient.

On a related note, how do you know whether you're magnesium deficient?

How often does your leg go to sleep?

If this is a personal question and not an hypothetical question meant to answer my own question, the answer is: Pretty much never. Paresthesia is the word, by the way. (edit: douchebag aside struck through.) The last time I felt it I think I had slept on my arm too long one night.

As far as I know self-diagnosing magnesium deficiency is very, very difficult, as the symptoms (twitchiness, cramps, tremors, jaw clenching) are part of a differential diagnosis for many other conditions. But empirically, if someone noticed these symptoms and either adjusted his/her diet (spinach, quinoa, dark chocolate, whatever) to increase dietary magnesium or went on supplements like magnesium glycinate and then noticed an absence of the symptoms, then okay. I'm wondering though how anyone would know this, though there may be places online where upping one's magnesium is considered common knowledge. My concern would be kidney issues.

What's the connection here?

It's one of the symptoms of magnesium deficiency, IIRC.

For me, I can tell because I can't sleep right.

Maybe it's a placebo effect?

The red flag for being really magnesium deficient in my case was tightness or discomfort around my jaw. I noticed this when using drugs that depleted magnesium, and it was always immediately fixed by taking magnesium.

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