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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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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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Why are old people so obsessed with logistics? I'm definitely not the only person to notice this, I think it has come up in those Geico ads about "teaching people not to become their parents." I swear that every time I hang out with a parent or elder relative, they obsessively ask me about my car, my home, how I get from place to place, upkeep, roads, fuel, laundry, diets, etc. It's like the most important thing in the world is the random bullshit you have to deal with every day between the actual important things.
Also, the most old-person coded thing today is to tell someone how to get somewhere by referring to roads and landmarks instead of just saying the address amd assuming they'll use an app.
About fifteen or so years ago, on my trips back stateside, my own father, who died at ninety in 2020, would always ask on the drive home from the airport: "What's the price of a gallon of gas in Japan?"
Very little, if anything, did he ask about my family, my job, my free time, what my opinions were on anything. It annoyed me then. It annoyed me even more when he'd ask the same question a day or so later. "George, what's the price of a gallon ah gas in Japan?" As if unlocking this truth (which, even then, would have been trivially easy to search for online) would also unlock some gulf between us, throw open a door, pull back the veil of Isis. Or, the uncomfortable possibility: maybe he just never had much to say to me.
The answer to the gas question, if I could remember, was always prefaced by a didactic explanation on my part of liters and gallons and trying to sort out the conversion. It made me seem pedantic and foolish, and he'd get quiet again.
And now as I sit here in our living room staring at the light patterning the floor through the blinds I would give quite a bit to have him asking me that question, or any question.
Man this made me really sad. I need to spend more time with my dad.
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