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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Notes -
10 months ago, I made this post. I'm sure nobody cares, but I wanted to write an update, mainly for my own sake - putting this all out in the open should light a fire under my ass. When I wrote the original post, I was recovering from an injury that made me homebound for 3 months and for that whole time I was just trapped with my thoughts with no ability to release that energy anywhere. It got so bad, I was even getting panic attacks every other night before falling asleep. It's gotten better since, but I've still got a long way to go until I'm satisfied. I got in shape, fixed my health, and got significantly more social. Selank was a silver bullet for my social anxiety and I don't know how I've lived my life before it. The levels of stress I was experiencing in social situations were insane, even the times where I would rate my stress level a 4/10 would probably feel like a 7/10 to a normal person, I was just so used to being stressed. Now it feels like I don't have social anxiety. I still have some, what I imagine, normal anxiety here and there, but it's not crushing to the point where I can't function in social situations. My only issue now is my own beliefs and mental limitations that prevent me from getting better. I'm slowly working through them, but it will take time. In those 10 months, I've become a lot more proactive with my existing friendships and that yielded a lot of results - I've got something going on almost every week, and I've taken a few trips with friends. I even was an extra in a commercial my friend produced, something that I would've definitely avoided doing before Selank. My social life genuinely did a 180, and I imagine I'm currently at the "this is what an average 28 year old's social life is like living in the suburbs" level, which is great, but I'm not happy.
All this socializing just makes me face my inadequacy - sometimes people would ask me what I do these days and I would freeze and mumble 'I trade equities and crypto', and I can feel the judgement coming because it usually either means that I'm an unemployed loser or one of those course peddling scammers. And if they learn that I still live with my family, it pretty much confirms their judgement. Not everyone does this, but when it happens it feels horrible. I've caught myself trying to overcompensate for it by doing absolutely retarded things like wearing my expensive watch when I absolutely had no reason to or trying to squeeze status indicators into conversations just to make sure they know (no, my former classmate doesn't need to know my tax bill for the year is 6 figures). It's embarrassing to even write about it. And all this ties to my other issues - I haven't met any new people at all. In fact, I don't even try. Still living with parents at 28. Unemployed, never had a job. Yes, I have some money and I'm doing better than ever, but on paper I'm a chud and I'm embarrassed of it. It's funny, because the solution is so easy - it starts with just moving out, I can definitely afford it. But then I'd be spending an extra ~$30k/year, probably living a worse lifestyle than I do now. My monkey brain is rejecting this idea. Not to mention, that it still doesn't solve the other, more complex parts of the issue such as lack of identity. Trading is a snoozefest, I don't even get dopamine hits from winning trades anymore. I probably have 2-3 more years of it in me, but then what? Not to mention that never having a real job and making money off trading just destroyed my perception of money - losing $50k on a trade is okay in my head, but somehow spending $30k-40k/year on a my own housing is an unacceptable expense.
Anyways, I'm fucking weird, I'll have to get over it and 'grow up'. At the very least, crippling social anxiety is no longer the main issue and that feels liberating. The plan is to wrap all the business up by the end of the year and do some solo traveling. I can be someone else while traveling, so no feelings of inadequacy and no mental limitations to prevent me from meeting people. I'll also be around a bunch of new people that are my age and are willing to socialize, an environment I haven't been in since college. After that, I'll do month long stays in young people hubs - NYC, Austin, etc. Hopefully that gives me some clarity on what I wish to do with my life.
I suspect that the activity of setting up a life away from your parents would help. You have enough to put 20% down on a quadplex - why not do that, live in one unit, rent out the others? Focus on making that building pretty, learn how to maintain things, spend more time having an influence in the physical world. Then your wealth will be concrete to you.
Maybe that's not your thing, but something should be. Seize the means of production!
Besides the career advice, the other thing is that everyone should have at least two hobbies - one where you build something and one that builds you. Like knitting and reading classics. Or wood working and volunteering. The first hobby, you plan, execute, and enjoy a product that you will use in the physical world. The second hobby, you do something that builds you up in virtue and makes you appreciate beauty and virtue in others.
Traveling is good to some extent but I don't think it's what you need to finally put your adolescence at an end.
I'm extremely bearish on real estate. The opportunity cost of putting a chunk of my money (and time!) into this endeavor is just too great, even though I understand that it would give me purpose and something to do day to day. Not to mention that I would also be a 'real estate investor' instead of a 'trader', probably an upgrade in people's eyes.
I agree. I need to work on this. The hobbies I currently have are non-social and all boil down to either increasing my money stack (online poker, side hustles) or keeping me in shape (swimming and working out).
You're definitely right. It seems like a temporary solution to the problem. But also, once again, my economically optimized brain is telling me I should do this now while I'm still young and living with family - going on long travels while paying $2.5k/month for my own place would make me hate myself, it's lighting money on fire for no apparent reason.
What is the point of money to you? It seems like you view money as a terminal goal, instead of a representation of the trade of value/effort between people, which you can then employ in your own goals by exchanging for other people's efforts.
What goals are you working towards achieving right now? If you don't have any, the first goal should be to find that "hobby that builds you." You need to build yourself up to actually find good things desirable and worth pursuing. Money is not desirable or worth pursuing for it's own sake - it is worth pursuing as an intermediary step for other goals.
I grew up in a family that was transitioning from lower class to upper middle class, so I got to experience both the bad times and the good times. And then my experiences got reinforced by the comparison of my family's [new upper middle class] life and lives of all of my lower class friends. Visiting a friend and seeing how his parents sleep in the living room, and him sharing a tiny bedroom the size of my closet with his sister and having to do homework on the kitchen table, then going back home to my own room the size of half his apartment, with my own desk, left a very strong impression on me. So for the longest time, I've treated money as an ultimate goal because having no money leads to a plethora of issues I don't want to deal with. And aside from that, I think the fact that money is such a simple indicator of whether you're winning or losing has always been appealing to me. Other parts of life are a lot more complex and winning conditions are not as clearly defined.
High level goals: 2-3x current net worth, find something I enjoy doing without monetary reward (or at least with monetary reward not being the main aspect), and have a family before I turn 35.
I'm very aware of my issues, when I was a lot younger I was even more money focused. A simple hangout with friends would throw me into an opportunity cost calculation and whether I'd learn anything useful from spending time with them vs sitting alone in my room focusing on my business. I don't know if it was a defense mechanism from my social anxiety that would just try to come up with any and all excuses to not socialize or if it was my actual way of thinking, but it wasn't a good mindset. I'm significantly better than this now. I don't mind spending money on experiences or on friends these days.
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