site banner
PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   1427 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for September 23, 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).

2
Top Bottom New Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

New Year's resolution check-in:

  • Didn't go to the gym last week as I was on holiday. Annoyingly, on the last day of my trip I woke up with a sore throat which developed into a headcold which has yet to clear up. Haven't yet been to the gym since I got back. Determined to go three times this week, even if I only end up walking on the treadmill for an hour. I can deadlift 1.82x my bodyweight, squat 1.33x and bench press 0.82x.
  • Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.

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

Spending is $2,130.86 lower than the same day last year. I just mailed the check for the last part of my home repairs, so next week won't look as good. I think I'm still on track, though.

  1. Work: working on the figures for my paper.
  2. Fitness. Had a half marathon this past weekend and ran what I was hoping (1:19), but it did not feel as easy as I was hoping, as this was supposed to be a marathon-pace workout. Foot feels better but I'm still feeling a bit tired.
  3. Intellectual stuff: Two blog posts still, got another paid subscriber which was nice. Just finished Lenin for philosophy book club, and we are reading Peter Turchin next who should be super interesting.
  4. Finances: This should still be a net positive month, but I've still spent way too much. Need to sit down with the budget next week and figure out how I can do better. Spending so far: $2970.
  5. Dating. Met my girlfriend's sister at the race and hung out with her (the girlfriend) almost the entire day Saturday. It's difficult for us to meet up during the week, which has had the effect of making me more productive and more willing to do chores during the week so I have more time to spend with her over the weekend. Also have continued to be porn and masturbation free. Who knew it would be this easy all along.
  6. Tarot. Talked about meditation and my friend's job situation.
  7. Socializing: called my friend in Florida, went to run club friday morning, and saw both my friend Adam and my girlfriend at the race.
  8. Screen time: 1.2 hours.
  9. Meditation: 5 minutes 5x last week. Would like to make this more of a priority, although this week was significantly better.

1:19 is incredible. I'm doing a half-marathon by myself this weekend, and I'll be chuffed to bits if I can do it in 1:50.

For context my PR is 1:12 from a few years ago. I'm hoping to do under 2:40 at Chicago in a few weeks, so this result was a little scary.

Good luck with your own half!

Met my girlfriend's sister at the race and hung out with her (the girlfriend) almost the entire day

Which one is hotter?

Girlfriend.

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.

Random bullshit you have to deal with every day is one of the important things.

They care about you. Asking about all those little things is their way to make sure that you're healthy and safe. If you're not eating right and your car's on the fritz, the "important" things get a lot harder.

They don't have "cool stuff" to do. As you slow down and accumulate responsibilities as you age, your time for hobbies shrinks.

To what age range are you referring when you say "old person"?

60+

That's just small talk showing they care about you?

Physical logistics used to be a bigger part of the day to day. My dad took pride in knowing all the alley/residential shortcuts to avoid traffic on his way home when the bridges were stuck. People took pride in maintaining a house and car. A person's car was an extension of their competence, a reflection of their personality, etc. Handling all the small bullshit in the world was life.

Downstream of this:

  1. It works as a proxy for really asking how things are going without prying, as @birb_cromble notes. In a guess culture, you can't just be like, "HELLO FELLOW AUTIST. ARE YOU DEPRESSED?", but you can triangulate it by asking about their life and reading between the lines. They haven't done anything with friends in two months. They aren't cooking, aren't eating anything interesting. They haven't fixed those problems with their car in half a year. Etc.
  2. It's signaling, because conversation is not about exchanging information. When ye olde person says "Oh sure. Just head down Lakeview, take a left at the legion and you're there", it's kind of giving directions, but it's also boasting that they are a competent person who has experience navigating the area and plenty of knowledge to share.
  3. It leads to deeper conversation. "How's your car runnin?", "Not bad but I picked up a flat when I was coming down the old forest road on Mount Pointytops." "oh whatcha doin up Pointytops way?", "me n' Sophie went camping. You know Sophie from dance class", "just the two of you?". or whatever.

and like, a lot of that is still relevant. I think there's just a lot more to life that people who frequent this forum care about and we (projecting) maybe wish people wanted to talk about. Like, I would love to get into conversations (and sometimes I do try) about people's online lives, their philosophical musings, etc, but most people just aren't that thoughtful or online. e.g. Most people's thoughts on AI are like "boo datacenters", "hate AI slop", and aren't keeping up with it. Most people aren't in niche internet subcultures. Most people haven't read Heidegger.

People took pride in maintaining a house and car.

Maintaining a car used to also be more accessible (e.g. carburetors you could tune with hand tools vs fuel injection that's computer-controlled), more necessary (design changes have increased the average car's expected lifespan from like 100k to 200k miles, so these days why try to eke out an extra 5% when it'll be so old you'll want a new model anyway?), and more valuable (average mileage and horsepower have gone up enough that it's no longer as big a deal if they decay a bit from more lax maintenance) ... but if you learned to be a "car guy" back when it was practical, you're probably still going to be one today now that it's just fun. I'm not quite old enough to be in that category, but I sympathize; I still upgrade computers component-by-component, like I learned to when options were more limited and I was more poor, even though "just buy a new one" would make as much sense these days.

I don't know why "maintaining a house" has declined in status, though. Construction quality hasn't gone up a lot, and land prices have, so I'd think that maintaining the quality of your home should be a bigger deal now that the cost of doing so is a smaller fraction of the home's price.

I think it's more that people are older when they get their first house. You aren't allowed to do much work in rental places.

So DIY home repair skills are completely useless for your early life and by the time you need them you're financially established enough that you can just hire someone.

Also illegal immigration has collapsed the price of minor handyman tasks, so it's not a huge deal to hire someone.

General male (coded) competence doing/fixing has become a long lost art in some quarters. My dad built a motorcycle out of a bicycle in his teens. He could pretty much repair or at least find the problem and learn to repair anything--or so it seemed to me at the time. Computers would of course be his undoing and late in life he'd end up having ordered a bunch of stuff online, or acquiring viruses, and so on and so forth. But in his day he was the definition of a competent male, taught of course by the model of his own father. I am far less handy but I'm surprised by the phenomena you describe here, particularly noticeable in Japan, where sometimes it seems general maintenance and repair goes the way of just hire someone to replace anything that one has allowed entropy to destroy.

My aunt spent years insisting that her hand drawn maps were superior to mapquest and foisted them on you at the drop of a hat. I wish I'd kept one or two.

Maybe they just try to be part of your life, and that's the way they know how to connect?

Now that I think about it, I'm starting to get into a new hobby/recreational activity that is skewing pretty pretty old (canoe camping) and the entire thing is a logistics puzzle for old people. You have to balance preparedness and comfort with ease of travel (more gear means more painful portages). It's like life is too simple and you need to find a way to make a challenge out of it.

my car, ... how I get from place to place, upkeep, roads, fuel,

This is the ideal conversation with any older guy who is worth talking to. It's great to shoot the shit about which back highways they've traveled, what conditions were like, what car they were driving, good view points along the way, noteworthy diners or gas stations, cool small towns, etc. This applies double to anyone who has done significant off-road driving. I'd much rather talk about all that than be subjected to the latest talking points from CNN/Fox/FB.

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.

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.

Do you have servants to handle the random bullshit for you? Are you naturally perfectly adept at handling the random bullshit? If no to both, then conversing about how to handle it seems like a good way to review your random-bullshit-handling.

It sounds like you are complaining that the old people in your life are caring too much about your basic material well-being? Steak too juicy, lobster too buttery stuff.

It’s doubly aggravating when you have elderly bad parents. They don’t give one solitary shit about you having been molested as kid, but God help you if your tire pressure is 2 psi off.

Oof, is that ever painfully accurate.

Not to say that being molested isn't traumatic, but elderly don't know how to help process the abuse if they didn't help when they were younger and more mentally capable. It's a past event which can't be un-done, and bringing it up can retraumatize people and stress out the old people who mostly want to believe everything is fine and dandy out of mental self-preservation before they die.

Tire pressure is a quick easy fix though, and within some old guy's expertise. He can't help with the abuse though, that's probably closer to a car transmission full rebuild.

Yes, but I know what the old bastard’s cum smells like, so it’s a little tough to sit there and let him act like he’s my father, and not a human animal. And my mother knew back then and didn’t do jack shit, and she keeps trying to get me to interact with him and I hate her for it. I know she’s probably just getting up in the years and isn’t all there, but how am I supposed to get over that?

Damn, didn't know you were talking about the abuser themselves. Some things just can't be forgiven IMO and there's no point maintaining the relationship especially with the enablers too. Thought the abuse was from an unrelated party kind of situation, not that it would make it much better.

It's not a steak too juicy situation when they consistently ignore your feelings, how you're actually doing as a person, the actually important things in life, to exclusively ask about 'dry' bullshit.

A lot of people don't do emotional and feelings talks, important as they are. It can be due to a lack of cultivated social skills, generational differences, or just apathy. But asking about the 'dry' bullshit is easier and within the basic parental instincts and ability of most people, much of my own elder family included. I don't think it's fair to criticize old people for not doing helpful things that are outside of their ability. They do what they can, and I'm glad for their effort even if it falls short compared to other old people.

Basically, some people are incapable of higher-level talks, and no amount of education or effort is going to change that, especially in old age.

For me it's the weather that's they won't stop talking about. It feels like they're trying to control the narrative and manipulate you- they get to say how the weather is, you tacitly agree because who cares about the weather, so they can feel like they have the upper hand when they want to move onto more important matters

I am a million percent certain it's not that deep.

You talk about the weather because either you have nothing better to talk about, one of you genuinely does care about the weather (genuinely nice or bad weather has a real impact if one's hobbies or chores involve touching grass), or, possibly, predicting the weather can be fun.

Im gonna blow your mind.

These kinds of things — they are, in a sense, the important stuff. Caring for yourself and your family, and figuring out how best to go about it is how real life works. Real life is jobs, chores, family and home care and so on. The ordinary stuff is where you care for yourself and the people and community you actually care about. Fake shit is the global type issues like international politics where you have no control over, culture war stuff that’s happening far away from you, AI stuff being done in companies you can’t control. They’re interesting to talk about, sure, but you have no control over it, and obsessing about it is not going to make your actual life better.

Im a woman, and a lot of older female conversations are about cooking, cleaning, husbands, and child care. Why? Because this is what adult female humans do with their time. Adult male humans deal with mechanical issues of the home and car, the yard, kids’ sports, and careers. And so you talk to your older relatives, you’ll get that, weather, and sports. Weather and sports are fun ways to connect to people around you, and the rest is real life.

To be honest, especially as I get older, I find the people who obsess over politics, culture war, fandoms, and so on to be the boring ones. They obsess over things like that mostly because their real life isn’t all that great. They don’t care about normal everyday life because they have nothing in their real life worth caring about. They don’t care about cooking because they live alone in an apartment and have no boyfriend or girlfriend to cook for. They don’t care about their career because they work in basement level restaurant or retail and thus they don’t have a career to care about. Their car is a junker, why worry about upkeep? In order to have time to obsess about politics and culture and viral trends and fandoms, you have to have the kind of life only a Redditor could love. They don’t have anything going on in their real life, so they can sit around and argue about non-real-life stuff.

So, about that weird medical issue that has me wondering if I ought to eat more salt, and other electrolytes.

I get these painful calf cramps once in a while. The frequency is generally in the neighborhood of every 6 months to a year or so, probably sometimes longer intervals. It's hard to be completely sure, since I only started noting down the dates of them for the last couple of times. I'm not even sure how long ago it really started, though it's definitely years. I'm pretty sure it started at some point after I started eating Keto 8-10ish years ago, though not soon enough after to be an obvious correlation.

So far, it's only happened when I'm lying down, and have been for a while. When it happens, it hits with no particular signs or warning, one of my calf muscles instantly cramps up pretty hard. It's pretty painful, and if I grab the muscle, it feels like a brick under my skin. I think it lasts around 10 seconds or so, but it's hard to be sure, since I've never timed it. Afterward, the muscle feels sore, as if I just did a tough workout, which usually lasts for hours, but no other lingering pain or damage. It only hits one leg, and I think it's random which one. If it were to happen while I was standing, I think I'd probably fall down, though it never has yet.

At first, it seemed to happen most commonly after a night of moderate to heavy drinking. After some searching around, I got the idea that it might be related to an electrolyte deficiency of some kind. I started preparing and drinking a glass of electrolyte water (sodium, potassium, magnesium) every time I came home after drinking before going to bed. This seems to have more or less worked, and it didn't happen for quite a while. Then it started happening again, but not after drinking at all, infact no particular correlation to anything I can tell so far. I'm wondering if maybe it is still related to electrolyte issues, and would be helped by consuming more electrolytes in general regardless of activity, or even just more salt possibly.

I'm generally in good health, don't have any other health issues, and aren't on any prescription medications. I pretty consistently do 5k-10k+ steps every day based on my phone's step counter. Eating moderately keto has helped keep my weight in check.

I haven't tried to ask any proper doctors about this. I don't really go to any much anyways. I don't have much confidence that I'd get any kind of useful answer from them on this issue. If there was some way take a blood test immediately after, or even before, one happened, that might give some useful hard information, but it seems rather impractical due to how infrequent it is. Possibly a urine sample from right after would be reasonably practical and useful. Or maybe my attempts to consume more electrolytes will mean it goes away entirely anyways. Just thought I'd post it here in case anyone is curious or might have some kind of insight.

Sounds like what I know as a "charley horse". No idea how to solve them, though. Potassium and hydration was what I was always taught, but that doesn't mean it ever did anything.

Hmm, I'd always thought of Charley Horses as mild cramps that happened while exercising. This is severe pain while resting. Some searches claim that is a variant of the same thing, so maybe it is, and the treatment seems similar. At least that gives it a probable actual name.

I also have heard what you’ve described above (abrupt and major calf cramp while sleeping/resting) called a Charlie horse. The mild cramp while exercising (presumably in your side/abs), I’ve always called a stitch.

I used to get Charlie horses (as in, exactly what you’ve described, to a T) pretty often (like, once every couple months) during a period when I was taking much worse care of myself. The last time I got one was a few months ago after a, let’s say, rather significant night of drinking. Before that I hadn’t had one in years. As far as I know, dehydration is the main cause, as well as a lack of potassium, which is why they correlate with excessive drinking and being hungover. Being overtired can also bring them on, I think, although that’s probably a more indirect causation via tiredness fucking up your body in general. I’d honestly suggest just drinking more water during the day and adding a few bananas to your weekly diet, and stretching won’t hurt either.

If you don’t notice any change after doing that for a while it may be worth asking a doctor to do some tests/screening in case you have some other, less common sort of deficiency going on. But I’d bet it helps.

I already drink a lot of water pretty much every day. In fact, I had the idea that might be contributing to the problem, from washing away electrolytes. I did start adding a packet of this Liquid IV electrolyte supplement that we have available at work to the water I drink with my workday lunch, which has a pretty comparable amount of potassium to a banana reportedly. It may take the better part of a year to see if it really does the trick though, due to the low frequency.

How is your calcium intake?

No clue, I mostly eat meats and vegetables in forms that don't have nutrition labels, so I don't even have much idea of how to get an accurate estimate of that.

Do you eat like four servings of dairy and/or [spinach/bok choy/kale/ broccoli] a day?

So far, it's only happened when I'm lying down,

I run, and I've dealt with calf cramps before, and while the literature is still inconclusive on exact causes, electrolyte issues and muscle fatigue are most commonly blamed. Neither alone will fix everything: pounding pickle juice won't get you through a marathon untrained without cramps. It might help to do some minor strength work on the calves (and their antagonists) regularly, especially if you aren't exercising regularly. A dozen calf raises and toe raises a couple times a week seems a modest time commitment, if you're willing to try.

The other thought I have is that it could be related to positioning: I've had trouble with calf cramps while swimming before, which is funny because you don't really use your calves for that at all. But you do point your toes for extended periods, which isn't a very common posture otherwise. When I've had similar calf cramps while sleeping, I've noticed that I sometimes sleep with my toes pointed. If you're doing that, perhaps a change in posture could avoid the issue. There are also products that might help for sleeping (compression socks, ankle braces), but I haven't tried any myself.

I do do that 5-10k steps a day, which is walking at a brisk pace back and forth to my current job in the heart of NYC. It may not sound like that much to some, but when Covid WFH limited my walking for a couple years and I started up again, it was pretty tiring and left me a little sore for the first couple of weeks. I don't do any strength training right now, but I do train Muai Thai roughly once a week.

I don't think I point my toes while sleeping. Once in a while, I do that deliberately to crack my ankle, which I don't think has ever triggered one of these types of cramps.

Speaking of kind of exercise related and weird muscle issues, I also occasionally get a restless or antsy feeling in my quads and I think also calves. It doesn't seem to be related to the cramps, I think. It's basically a physical need to stand, walk, or even run. Once in a while, it feels intense enough that I just need to go outside and run a few blocks. Pretty weird I guess.

Anyways, hopefully consuming substantially more electrolytes daily will help some.

I've had the same problem for several years, let me know if you figure out a solution.

Where do you get your cramps? I have gotten cramps in my legs and feet, and occasionally elsewhere, for my entire life. If I eat a banana every few days I don't have cramps. I am sure it is tied entirely to potassium intake for me. I never get the cramps within a day or two after eating a banana, every time I get a cramp it has been several days since I've had a banana. I've looked up alternate sources of potassium- avocado is supposed to be one, but I find that avocados don't work as well as bananas for me.

What did people do to prevent cramps before they had access to exotic fruit?

More vegetables probably. As in 90% of the diet.

Other great sources of potassium: Potatoes with skin, spinach, beans/lentils, salmon and clams. I happen to dislike spinach, beans and lentils, so I don't get my potassium there. I'm not a huge potato person and didn't eat much seafood until a few years ago. Other people probably get plenty of potassium from those foods but I don't, so the bananas it is for me.

Plenty of meats and fishes are good sources of potassium if you eat them with their cooking juices

I've had a journey on this issue. I was getting charlie horses in both fucking legs while hiking. Turned out it was caused by creatine.

https://www.themotte.org/post/3412/smallscale-question-sunday-for-december-14/391978?context=8#context

My doctor was pretty stumped by this but some meathead suggested I'm not hydrating enough and the creatine worsens it because it pulls so much water into muscles.

Anyway I stopped taking creatine but had other signals I wasn't hydrating enough: I would run with a group and be the only one feeling like shit on the longer runs even though we were training the same.

I figured out I have a very hard time staying hydrated (I'm in my 40s). I just never feel thirsty at all. I basically have to force myself to remember to drink any water, and need to go out of my way to strap bottles of water with an eighth of a teaspoon of salt in them to a vest when I go for runs.

Much better overall now that I'm deliberately hydrating, but damn is it tedious.

btw if you feel one coming on in your leg sit down and grab your toes with your hand and try to extend your leg completely, essentially pulling your toes back and stretching your calf out. It often provides immediate relief without lingering soreness.

I just did a big data analysis with Claude of the last four years of my health data.

Conclusions: Basically sleep doesn't affect anything. At all. This is probably because my sleep is in a very tight range (6-8 hours). This suggests I can probably chill out about my sleep needs, barring a major lifestyle change that would drastically improve some aspect of my sleep that I'm somehow blind to.

I'm pretty sure that Walker book about sleep was an info hazard that made everyone needlessly miserable about their sleep quality the last 7(?) years. Worse he was accused of academic misconduct for blatantly misrepresenting a graph (among other things) and nobody did anything.

Yup! It's such an info hazard that I'm still looking for ways to radically improve my sleep despite the fact that my sleep is clearly pretty good.

I will say Guzy's response to that book was just as bad however. It's probably not good to force yourself to sleep less than your body needs.

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