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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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Dating: How does one answer the, “what do you do for fun,” question? I’m pretty sure I can’t tell her that I like watching insane political YouTubers, following stupid internet drama, watching football, and analyzing classical music scores (or can I? I’ve never actually tried this).
The top tier of hobby qualities are "produces something interesting to others" and "done socially with interesting people". If you don't have any of these (Hail Mary attempts: do you re-arrange the scores after analysis? do you have a group who watch games with you? do you play, either music or football?) it's probably worth getting one or two for your own sake, even aside from the question of whether they appeal to dates.
The second tier is "produces positive change in yourself". The "classical musical scores" one is intellectual enough that it might qualify as "positive change in yourself", worth mentioning. You might even be able to elicit genuine interest from someone who is only politely curious at first, as long as you're tracking the ratio of politeness-to-curiosity in the conversation and don't go full autistic-hyperfixation. (not sure if that's a risk for you; maybe that's just me)
There's also a nonlinearity in the above tiers: combining "produces" with "done socially" can be better than the sum of its parts. It's not a first-date offer, but later on "let me bring you in to a group of friends and teach you X" is gold for establishing status and creating attachment.
The last tier sometimes worth talking about is "consumes something interesting to others", but the trouble with those is that people have varied and narrow definitions of "interesting" in this context. You might find a woman for whom either "watching football" or "analyzing classical musical scores" already qualifies. (Or you might find one for whom both qualify - do not propose marriage immediately after finding this out; give it at least a month.) That might be a long shot, but regardless, don't be afraid to talk about hobbies in this tier if asked; good way to weed out narcissistic or closed-minded or superficial dates.
The bottom tier qualities are "consumes something uninteresting" and "produces negative change in yourself". You might think the former case is a paradox, but there are a lot of things that are addictive to the user yet repellent to non-users. "Stupid internet drama" (I say, judgmentally, because surely I could quit anytime I wanted!) and "insane political YouTubers" might fall in both categories (this is worth worrying about for your own sake), and probably fall in both categories to anyone first hearing them. Don't lie to your date about them if somehow the topic comes up, but if possible keep the topic from coming up.
Suppose, rather than watching insane political YouTubers, Quantumfreakonomics instead liked reading the ramblings of insane political philosophers on certain political forums that have migrated off of Reddit and onto their own self-hosted website. Crazy hypothetical, I know. How would he frame that?
My first impulse is to scream "I said I could quit any time I wanted!" Impulse control is important but hard.
More seriously, while there's probably better solutions, "Don't lie to your date about them if somehow the topic comes up, but if possible keep the topic from coming up." is probably still Plan A here. The only obvious upgrade (from both dating and personal perspectives) is to make sure it's possible to honestly frame "insane political philosophers" as a small subset of "political philosophers" whose ramblings you read. There are legitimate benefits to reading the crazy rants here (anything topical hasn't had a chance to be filtered by the test of time regardless; most crazy thoughts are not brilliant innovations but most brilliant innovations seem crazy at first, etc), but if the central goal is "philosophy" rather than "crazy" then these should be the condiments, not the meal.
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