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PaperclipPerfector  17hr ago (text post)   253 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for July 1, 2026

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).

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My journey feels like it is mostly unidirectional and I haven’t noticed the cycles. For me it was:

  1. Get good grades and follow rules to please the adults.
  2. Play Magic: the Gathering and video games for enjoyment and socialization with peers.
  3. Get a post-college job.
  4. Start burning out at work and romantically due to unwritten social rules that I didn't understand.
  5. Look for social rules/advice on the internet.
  6. Find SlateStarCodex.
  7. Realize that my observations and struggles around socialization were due to undiagnosed Aspergers and gain a better understanding of tribal social games.
  8. Make some posts in SSC adjacent communities about politics and personal struggles to get feedback on things I didn’t feel safe discussing elsewhere.
  9. Lose interest in most politics/controversial topics on the internet because people are just optimizing for engagement instead of having good faith discussions. (I've seen the pattern enough to learn that keeping any controversial opinions to myself generates the best outcomes).
  10. Get into weird (but less controversial) topics that seem to attract more open-minded people and keep normies away because they don’t have enough background information to keep up. (Things like Carl Jung, John Vervaeke, and nootropics).
  11. Do weird self-experimentation with nootropic assisted exposure therapy to reduce the amount I care about social pressure.

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