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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   448 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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The first time I googled the phrase "autistic burnout", one of the top results was an article titled "Help, I'm getting more autistic!" I was kind of pleasantly surprised to see that other people experienced it this way--as literally "getting more autistic" when burnt out--because perceiving it as such but not thinking that was possible or typical had me kind of feeling like I was just going crazy. This was in ~2019, shortly after the scales first fell from my eyes and I realized that relating to my (long-diagnosed Asperger's) brother but being able to route around the same inclinations so that I didn't act quite like he does was not the same thing as not being autistic. It's funny to me though, that the common opinion chalks burnout up to psychological factors. As someone with co-occurring chronic fatigue etc. type of issues, it's long been obvious to me that my social function worsens when my physical health worsens, even before the autism possibility had entered my brain. Burnout, in my opinion, is as much an energy or at least medical issue as it is a psychological one.

I live in vicious merry-go-round cycles like this: I overextend myself, live inauthentically to fit in, don't take care of myself because my needs (both in terms of health issues and in terms of autism) are weird, fake, made-up, just be normal bro--and I ruin my health, burn out, withdraw, and struggle to recover until I burn every bridge so I can start over finally listening to my own instincts/intuition again about what my needs are. However, as I get older, I seem to maybe be making strides at leveraging smaller epicycles to lessen the dramatic swings of the mega cycles. The net result, at the moment, is that I have made good strides on my physical health recently* without having indulged in the formerly-prerequisite "complete social withdrawal" step. And I'm feeling pretty rapidly quite a bit more socially functional. And feeling quite a bit of whiplash.

Anyway, the reason I bring this to The Motte: I'm curious if anyone else goes through times in your lives where you are more socio-culturally-politically more "normie" and times when you are more "extreme", outlier, believe things that could get you cancelled, etc? I feel like the one-way-street is the default: you start out normie and something "radicalizes" you (lol). Has anyone else swung back and forth?

We're not in COVID times anymore: I leave my house and interact with a variety of people. I can't maintain the same psychological/social quarantine I used to that made it less stressful to hold would-make-everyone-think-I'm-a-bad-person opinions. As a result, I can feel this go-along-to-get-along opinion-normifying happening to me, and I think most people would tell me that's normal and good for me. I know for myself it is not. I will think it's fine while the dissonance eats at my subconscious until it wrecks me again at some later date. Does anyone else experience this? What do you do to hold onto things? Is this why everyone is going to church now? I would love to talk to anyone who relates at all to being in this boat.

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.

Okay, I deleted my post before any comments showed up for me because I decided it was too long for anyone to engage with and I would try again when I had time to make it shorter. Whoops.

I am curious how social you are in your current life, and what portion of your social interaction is in-person vs online?

Whoops.

This website allows users to "undelete" comments.

Thank you, I didn't know that. It's back, with some chunks cut out to bring it down to a saner length and readability.

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