site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1583 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for July 15, 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).

0
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

New Year's resolution check-in:

  • Published my sixteenth blog post of the year on Monday, a review of ARX-Han's Incel, lightly edited from a comment I posted here.
  • Returned from my holiday on Saturday evening and went to the gym on Monday evening. Can deadlift 1.89x my bodyweight for 3 reps, squat 1.32x for 6 reps and bench press .89x for 6 reps.
  • Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st. Nearly at the halfway mark.

How goes it @self_made_human, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble, @ThomasdelVasto and @falling-star?

Doing well! Started dancing again, have been having a ton of fun with that. Continuing to gym, going to PT tomorrow to try and fix some issues in my form.

Doing well enough. The back is better, and I'm back to being mostly better. I become increasingly glad that I'm a doctor, and a decent one: it's the strongest ammunition there is when it comes to making other doctors take you seriously and in convincing them to do the right thing. It's a miracle that non-medics engage with the healthcare system at all, but I suppose it beats dying. The human body continues reminding me that there are riders attached to the lifetime warranty. It's good that I read the manual.

No real exercise beyond carrying my fair share of a busy ward on my back. Getting a suitable amount of professional recognition for it.

it's the strongest ammunition there is when it comes to making other doctors take you seriously and in convincing them to do the right thing

Maybe it's different for people who can build a relationship with a specific doctor that follows them, but here where you get whoever you're lucky enough to see, the second a non-doctor suggests they have a suspicion as to what they actually have, the doctors will update heavily against the probability of it being that and will do everything they can to dismiss it being what was suggested, as if their now tainted diagnosis should be your punishment for daring to think about anything medical as a stupid plebian. I mean, I know a lot of people otherwise would waste ressources because of Cyberchondria, but not everyone outside of the medical profession is a drooling moron either. And not everyone inside of it hasn't devolved over time into one since medical school.

You are talking to a doctor who has, at least on LessWrong, written a guide that might as well be called:

"Here's how you, a competent non-medical professional who knows how to use Google and ChatGPT, can maximize the value from the medical system in a manner that won't shoot your dick off."

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ypnYfPmn6FqAyxCpJ?commentId=PBQGQ3buve228rNXu

You are preaching to the choir. A reasonably well behaved and sympathetic choir.

At the same time, I have explained at length why the behavior of other doctors is understandable, if not laudable. You and other UMC professionals who do their own research are not representative of the super-majority of patients a typical doctor sees in clinics. There are a lot of idiots out there. Or simply average people who watch the wrong influencers on TikTok.

I am genuinely sorry to hear about your negative experiences with other doctors, either personally or second-hand. I would not be so bold as to call myself the best clinician around, but I try and make up for that with good bedside manner, patience and an open mind.

Doctors are not a homogeneous population, unfortunately there are those who react poorly to perceived challenge. I can't bring myself to hate them, I have felt my patience running short when someone with uncontrolled diabetes shows up with their toes on the verge of falling off and reveals that they refused to take medication as prescribed and decided to use a combination of old Google, influencers and other questionable sources to opt for homeopathy. This is has happened more than once, though I didn't keep the toes. Fortunately, even free ChatGPT is a clear improvement in terms of quality of information and presentation to laymen. I would be genuinely surprised if it defended homeopathy without very significant nudging.

I would be grateful if I wasn't asked to answer for the sins of a profession I am associated with. That is quite possibly not your intent, but it happens a lot. All I can do is be better myself, and try to help people navigate the system.

Oh, I was simply concurring about the difficulty of having a doctor take you seriously, not asking you to answer for it!

I imagine the best solution is to have a family doctor who knows you and knows that you wouldn't bother him if the symptoms weren't well listed before you opened the damned medical encyclopedia, and that you understand and care about the statistical probability of zebras but sadly it seems this is a system we cannot afford here, so random dismissive generalist it is.

You and other UMC professionals who do their own research are not representative of the super-majority of patients a typical doctor sees in clinics.

To add to this, some of the worst and most misinformed patients are those who come from a background like engineering and have become highly convinced of something that's very incorrect (with or without conspiracy stuff). The less educated and informed patients can be reasoned with or dictated to in a timely fashion where the higher intelligence or education patients who are confidently wrong need a lot of time and space to unpack the incorrect assumptions.

Spending is $2,807.93 less than the same time last year. The home repairs got delayed a week due to weather. I assume that this will get worse in the next week or two.

  1. Work. Still in this UK class, having a great time. Becoming Europilled.
  2. Fitness: Mileage suffered a little with travel last week but still did 40 miles and 1x tempo session! Back to normal this week I think. Saw the lowest heart rate I've ever record this week (39).
  3. Intellectual stuff: finished Blood Meridian finally. Terrible book, I think both Game of Thrones and The Dark Tower books do the theme much better. Learning loads of language/other stuff from my European colleagues.
  4. Finances: Not even thinking about this until the end of the month.
  5. Dating. I've very quickly redeleted my dating apps again. Not helpful
  6. Tarot. No session.
  7. Socializing: Been very social in bath
  8. Screen time: 2.5 hours, but makes sense given travel!
  9. Mental health: Pretty good, although lots of anxiety on this travel trip

finished Blood Meridian finally. Terrible book

You are not allowed to say this you... you... Whatever you are, I sentence you to be thrown into a pit. At the bottom, looking upwards to the sky, it will be your own tempest stirring. It will be your body thrashing against red clay walls. It will be your voice that lashes out against the inhumanity and indignity of your sentence as your voice booms in fury, hoping to reach the sky with your intentional heresies. Your mortal vessel may fail before this spirit is extinguished, but with the torture of time pressing on your voice will become detached from its defiance. You will find invectives no longer reach the heavens. Instead they swirl around your hole like a pride of Comanche riders set on scalping your soul.

Lashing out upwards no more the sky will become foreign to you. No longer appearing as an escape hatch or an object of desire, the passing clouds and lazy buzzards will only be seen as through a dull window to a queer place. A dream ready to be forgotten, a land you can never return to. Turned inward, the words will flow only as a meagre tool of weeping utterances. Your incoherent ramblings will no longer escape beyond the bounds of this Promethean existence, landing only as a feeble dribble that falls from chapped lips to bare feet, and you will be forced to look downward to find the pit is now your home. The pit is all you need. The pit is where you belong. You will converse with the dirt that surrounds you. You will say things like "Violence is the eternal dance," and as your only loyal friend the pit will eagerly listen to this newfound wisdom. You will speak to the walls and you will bury your hands into the dirt. You will whisper sweet nothings of despair directly into the ear of Gaia hoping to touch her cruel heart. Eventually, after your madness is cured, she will speak back and say, "Delete this. Delete this right now."

Upvoted for a really nice McCarthy parody. Laughed a lot.

Intellectual stuff: finished Blood Meridian finally. Terrible book, I think both Game of Thrones and The Dark Tower books do the theme much better.

I haven't read The Dark Tower, but the other two books have very different themes. The theme of ASoIaF is, to quote another work, "Come see the violence inherent in the system". It treats violence as something humans choose to do. GRRM wants us to judge them.

Blood Meridian, on the other hand, considers violence a force, an innate property of the universe, like magnetism. It doesn't emanate from the people or the systems they create, it permeates them. The Judge is not a monstrous human, he's a personification of violence, its avatar. And, contrary to his name, he doesn't judge and neither does McCarthy.

I did not view Blood Meridian as suggesting that violence is inherent to human nature. The judge wants you to think that's the theme, but the judge is a liar. I think Blood Meridian also wants you to see how a system of social pressure allows people to commit violent acts without blinking an eye because everyone else is doing it. The judge claims that this is a property inherent to humans, but from the first moment we meet the judge he is lying to get people to do what he wants, so why would he be telling the full truth when he monologues to the reader (credit to my friend Emory for this realization).

It's not inherent to humans alone, it's inherent to nature! Human violence is just a single facet of it.

I don't believe that this is the case. The kind of violence present in Blood Meridian is very much not inherent to nature. Animals do not engage in the kind of orgy of killing that Glanton's gang gets up to.

Forgive me for this:

A Game of Thrones is the novel, first book of the series A Song of Ice and Fire. Game of Thrones is a TV show.

I'm surprised you compare The Dark Tower favorably to Blood Meridian. I haven't read the latter, just The Road, so I'm no McCarthy truther, but The Dark Tower was incredibly underwhelming when I read it, and I was baffled it had the following it does. From my recollection, and this was fifteen years or so ago, The Dark Tower had only two good characters (Gunslinger and Man in Black) across two and half good books in it before it just falls apart at the seams and descends into nonsense. Yes, this includes the author insert and the demon-baby. I liked Roland's backstory, but it really didn't do much for the later books, and the suspension of disbelief eventually failed me.

It's the only King story I've ever read, and it didn't leave me wanting to read more. Maybe I need the Stand, or It, or something else, but it just didn't stand on its own very well, and ultimately didn't live up to its promise. Maybe if I had read it when I was a teenager, I'd feel fondly about it the way I do about The Wheel of Time.

I will give King credit where due, there aren't many better lines in fiction than, "Go then, there are other worlds than these."

The Dark Tower had only two good characters (Gunslinger and Man in Black) across two and half good books in it before it just falls apart at the seams and descends into nonsense.

100% accurate. The first 3 books are King at his drunk, coked-out, manic energy finest (I think the 3rd one was the last book he wrote before going to rehab). They are insane in many fun ways. Nothing after that lives up to the first three.

My B, I def meant A Game of Thrones.

I’m thinking of the series before book 5 where it goes off into crazy land. I like books 5-7 but i recognize that they are objectively bad, especially book 7 with its author insert and Spiderman 3 syndrome. I did genuinely enjoy the ending and I think the message genuinely resonated with me when I read the books. In terms of the focus on violence I’m really specifically thinking about The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three, which capture the over the top violence and tarot symbolism of BM without the purple prose, and with dialogue marks and actual character development.

I can understand not liking Blood Meridian - it is awfully grim and gory, sometimes cartoonishly. But what is the proposed common theme it shares with The Dark Tower and Two Towers? To me, The Two Towers is very much fundamentally hopeful - the world has evil and dysfunction, but it can be and is meaningfully confronted with heroism. In Meridian, heroism is rare and stands no chance.

The two towers? Never said anything about that.

With the gunslinger in particular, i see a lot of parallels between the judge and the man in black. The man in black through the whole first book is forcing roland to commit terrible acts of violence: murdering a whole town of people, pushing jake into the abyss, etc

With Game of Thrones I think the parallel is even more clear. There are specific characters who basically come straight out of BM (Gregor Clegane) and even characters who have some more moral complexity don’t hesitate to brutalize the peasantry in a way that Glanton’s gang would find very familiar.

Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st. Nearly at the halfway mark.

I quit pornography as part of my new religious commitments around the same time.

I was not expecting how difficult it would be to go from cumming once or twice a day to once a week when the kid is finally in bed at a reasonable how and my wife isn't too tired. I was also not expecting to be wondering what fresh fetishes hentai artist might be coming up with, or where certain story lines ended up going. I was not expecting how hard it would be to delete my stash of 20+ years, despite the fact that ostensibly I'm never going to touch it again.

When I was reading Introduction to Devout Life, the chapters on attachment to sin hit like a ton of bricks.

cumming once or twice a day

Gosh, I thought I had a high sex drive, and yet I imagine I could count on the fingers of two hands the number of days last year where I masturbated twice.

Which religion are you, out of interest?

C'mon folks, two-a-days is how men are built.

You know, if it's all the same, I'd rather not say. It's not a weird one, I just have conflicted feelings about turning my entire persona here into "WhiningCoil's newb experiences at church" or the like.

I get your position, but I do wish more people who were not raised with religion would talk about how they found their way to it. I posted a question about that as my first post here, but all the responses were from people raised in a religion who found their way back to it, which is a different matter.

I completely understand, I was just curious.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats