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 -
Haha I was thinking that as I wrote it, "hmm 14/15 year old me wasn't doing his math properly"
For uncertainty problems where there's a lower bound at zero and the uncertainty is over a large range of proportions, usually the geometric mean is more appropriate then the arithmetic mean; 14/15 year old you had good mathematical instincts.
I really wish I had anything at all useful to say about his or your actual problems; sorry.
No problem. The Dreadnoughts once had a blog post when the Ukraine War started that said
It's a striking line, and I think he wrote it in a post for Vicki's Polka too, which ended with the death of Vicki in 2020 and the family not being let in due to covid restrictions. It's striking because it's how I've viewed a lot of life. For a long time, I was immensely displeased that my life was not going how I wanted it. It's only now that I've lived this long and done so many things and talked to so many people that I finally realized: it's not the life I wanted, but it's a life. I can honestly say that I have lived a fulfilling life, and I think I'm a more interesting, more funny, more smart, more empathetic person overall than I was 10 years ago when I had all those social connections.
I was also struck by this feeling watching "In This Corner (and Other Corners) of the World", featuring a woman who was basically forced into marriage with someone she did not even know. She didn't hate him, but there was a lot about her situation that she felt was un-ideal, such as her sister-in-law treating her like garbage, and her not being able to do anything except smile and close her eyes and bear it like she always did, her hair thinning from the stress she kept hidden. And then, being 1930s Japan, the world started falling apart around her for reasons entirely outside of her control. Unspeakable horrors, but unlike Grave of the Fireflies, I feel it ends on a nicer note. We do not choose our circumstances, but we choose how we look at them and how we move forward from them, and in the end, Suzu from the movie provided a very nice model for how you do that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link