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Wellness Wednesday for April 5, 2023

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).

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What does TheMotte think about hiring a home cleaning service? There are a few wrinkles I consider when hiring a monthly or bimonthly cleaning service:

  1. I am very cheap and hate spending any discretionary income on anything, let alone a cleaning service.

  2. I have it in my head that I will buck up and actually clean the bathroom, but I've been living in my apartment a year and hardly ever do. (I've had cleaning services come by so it's not like my bathroom is completely disgusting).

Number 2 conflicts heavily with number 1 and causes me guilt. I feel like cleaning my house (really the bathroom) is something I should do without paying for a service, but I find it to be something I never get around to doing. So I'm pretty much at the point where I'm going to throw in the towel and schedule a monthly cleaning service. It's not cheap, $160 for a one bedroom apartment, but clearly I can't handle this chore myself.

I'm laughing as I write this post because it's so ridiculous, but here I am.

$160 for a one bedroom apartment

This seems almost cartoonishly expensive. You can get it for a lot cheaper by negotiating with a cleaning lady directly.

It is cartoonishly expensive. Bay Area living.

If you make more than $100k, it's your civic, rational, economic, and social duty to do so.

You have skills that are valuable in the economy. Many people do not in the modern world. Cleaning your bathroom out of some misplaced sense of personal duty is inefficient, and depriving people of their livelihood whose highest and best skill is cleaning bathrooms.

All those stoic philosophers we admire who talk about personal responsibility? Had servants who cleaned for them. Yes including the one who was himself a slave, most likely.

People say it's a moral failing not to clean for yourself have it precisely backward.

Highly recommend.

We got a cleaner after having children and can’t look back now. It’s materially increased the amount of free time my wife and I have to spend together while eliminating a range of unpleasant tasks.

Furthermore, we’ve built up a lovely relationship with our cleaners. Our toddler is always excited to see them come through the door and conversations can occasionally provide a fascinating insight into normie-land.

What does TheMotte think about hiring a home cleaning service?

It's not a signifier of high-income for no reason- people actually do like not having to worry about it. Just like cooking, when it's something that requires a lot of time to prep and contaminates the entire kitchen it's often more efficient (and tastier!) to choose an industrial kitchen- but a bit more niche and personal.

I just clean whenever I'm entertaining or when it gets to the point that it annoys me (usually a symptom of an underlying mechanical problem, like the sink or tub failing to drain). If it's not annoying me and I'm not worried about anyone seeing it, then there's no problem and am confused as to why it would be.

High income? Every middle class person I know uses cleaning services. Hell, many working class people I know use them too.

It is cheap and saves you from having to do a tedious activity, why wouldn't you buy this service?

If it helps on point 1., you might be able to get it for cheaper? I don't know about the US, but here in London I'd expect to pay less than half that to clean a one-bed apartment. (Maybe we're all just Europoors?)

Ya in my neck of the woods you can get a non-corporate cleaner to come in for like $30 an hour -- 2-3 hours seems like it would be plenty for a pro to clean a one bedroom?

I don't see any reason to feel guilty or embarrassed. Cleaning sucks. If I was on a middle class income I would absolutely pay someone else to do it.

We just hired a turkish cleaner woman for our 100m² apartment. She also works for family, so there's some level of trust, but it's still a form of capitulation versus our inability to handle this ourselves.

Still, better than living in a mess, I guess.

If you don't mind stuff getting stolen/missing or being misplaced, go ahead. I would just set aside a day and do the cleaning yourself: save money and peace of mind.

Three of my best friends will be moving in with me in the next two months: my cousin (C), my cousin's girlfriend (CGF), and my oldest childhood friend (OCF). C and CGF haven't met my OCF, and while they will get along, I don't expect them to be friends. C and CGF are there short-term while they look for another place to live and sort out their job situations. OCF will likely be there long-term.

Both rooms are upstairs with one full bathroom to share. I will ask OCF to use my bathroom in the master bedroom so C and CGF can have some privacy.

I see this as a risky, yet rewarding venture: we can have a really awesome time, but I may also get incredibly annoyed with them. Looking for a few thoughts and suggestions on house rules and maintaining friendships, whether it's from personal experience or literature.

Current house rules:

  • I'll meet with everyone and see what's important and virtually non-negotiable to each of them (clean kitchen, quiet hours, etc)

  • Social offers met with "no" should not be questioned (e.g., "Hey wanna do X", "No, thanks", "Okay, no problem!")

  • Let people know when you're having others over

  • Pets (CGF's one cat) should only be taken care of by the owner (with special exceptions as needed)

What kind of space do you have other than bedrooms? Because sometimes it can be stressful if each person only has either the communal living room or being isolated in their bedroom to choose between, particularly if some of you are unemployed.

Just a main living room and loft area. All of us are employed: I'm gone 630-5, OCF will be 8-5, C is WFH, and CGF is WFH/office hybrid, so we won't see each other too much.

I'd put aside one day of the week where you always eat together and another where you never eat together. Ironclad rules on what constitutes cleaning and how often it needs to be performed where and by whom. Same for financial participation. Not just rent, but who pays for random consumables or when the fridge breaks down. Write it all down right when they move in. You do not want to rely on people's generosity and their self-serving memory when discord rears its ugly head.

I like the meal idea. C is an excellent chef and enjoys cooking for others, so that shouldn't be too much of an issue. The other rules are a good idea.

  • Have a fallback plan. In addition to the normal concerns re: housemates, you're mixing romantic partnerships and platonic cohabitation. I would hope C + CGF don't break up!... but it'd be safer if doing so doesn't screw over your lease.

  • Assign chores to specific people, and make sure that the person assigned them does them. One of the more constant sources of strife for roommate (and romantic) environments is a different expectations for rates of doing certain cleaning tasks, and it's very easy for one person with higher standards to end up taking up a surfeit of tasks without anyone else recognizing. Saying you want a clean kitchen is one thing, realizing that for one person that means dishes are done nightly and for another this means dishes don't sit for more than three hours and the third person is okay as long as the dishes haven't overflown the sink is another. That's especially true if this is a first time away from home/college dorms; many people don't even know all the tasks and chores that will need to be done.

  • Related, figure out expectations re: food and other sundries. This usually isn't as big a point of strife, but shared fridges can end up with either a) 'personal' food that gets consumed by someone trying to stop it from going to waste, b) 'public' leftovers that don't get touched til growing or c) both. Sharpies help a lot here.

  • If you're expecting C + CGF to move out, make that explicit and set a target timeline. Don't expect to meet that timeline; the point is just so that everyone knows what's on the table, especially if rent may be in flux.

  • If you're a homeowner rather than renting, figure out how you'll be setting repair/maintenance fees. A surprise water heater or air conditioner fault can be a major repair bill, and your friends may not expect it or even be able to assist (and will near-certainly feel very pressured if they can).

  • Find a way to have some time away from home. There are some people who can spend 24/7 together, but they're exceptions.

If your OCF wakes up in the middle of the night to pee, will they have to walk into your room while you're sleeping to use the bathroom and possibly wake you up? Because I would not enjoy doing that.

The rest of the considerations rely mostly on local social culture, so they could be fine or they could be onerous.

There is a half bathroom he can use, but showering/getting ready would be mine. I've also thought about this and have yet to actually speak to him about it. I plan to take a hefty amount off the monthly rent I'm charging.

Does anyone use NMN or NR supplements for prevention of aging? After reading "Lifespan" by David Sinclair I've been supplementing with NMN for the last 2 or 3 years using Toniiq NMN supplements.

This decision has proved somewhat complicated. For one, many NMN supplements are frauds that contain no NMN at all (https://www.prohealth.com/blogs/press-releases/fake-fraudulent-nmn-products-on-amazon-exposed). Toniiq seems to be decent, but that just means it could work. Lots has to go right here for this to happen. The NMN has to be absorved. It has to turn into NAD+ in my body. And NAD+ has to actually do something.

So far, I'm down a few hundred bucks and I can say confidently that I've felt zero effects positive or negative from NMN.

Meanwhile, the people who are pushing NMN (David Sinclair) and NR (Charles Brenner) seem to have somewhat questionable ethics - both having received millions of dollars from supplement companies (Elysium in the case of Dr. Sinclair, and TruNiagen in the case of Dr. Brenner). They also apparently hate each other.

We get shit like this:

https://twitter.com/CharlesMBrenner/status/1642378345127227393

In the fog of war, I don't know what to think. Is one man a fraud? Are both men frauds? It reminds me of the debates over Ivermectin. The ground becomes so muddied there's no clear way forward. Where is Scott when you need him to write a 10,000 word essay on the subject?

In any case, much like Ivermectin, the null hypothesis would be that NMN doesn't do shit. But the testimonials of Dr. Sinclair in "Lifespan", especially in regards to his father, were so strong I want to believe.

I'm just going to piggyback off this to make my own supplement statement. Being a basic bitch, I listen to the Huberman Lab, and I decided to get the "Hormone Support" bundle from Momentous, more out of a sense of wanting to support the podcast than anything. I've used random supplements reported to boost testosterone on sporadic occasions, but never noticed much difference.

Since taking it, I've definitely noticed a mild difference. I've bulked up some, and put on a good amount of muscle, even though my diet and sleep has been all out of whack for personal reasons, and my workouts haven't been great either. It feels like I'm getting more out of this than I should. I'm thinking in the future I plan to buy any supplements I want to take from them, maybe the problem all along has been using supplements that don't actually contain supplements.

I recently completed the Deep Water lifting program (https://www.jon-andersen.com/free-deep-water-ebook/). It's a 6 week program intended to be run on a bulk, but though I gained 2kg, I don't feel like I've gained any muscle or gotten any stronger.

Some comments on the program - it's pretty unpleasant to run, Jon Andersen has a 300lb ego to match his 300lb body. It had me doing power cleans, which I've never done as part of a program. I'm pretty sure I'm doing them terribly.

But in the end the only thing that matters is results, and I didn't get them. I'm 2kg fatter and six weeks older, and left to brood over how weak, fat, and lazy I am. It's genuinely difficult to think about anything else.

This seems crazy to me. If you are indeed weak, fat, and presumably untrained, then darn near any 6 week program should have you showing nice results in strength if nothing else.

Weak and fat may be relative terms here. I'm not super familiar with deep water but my second hand impression was that it would kill a noob.

Some of my friends tell me I'm weak and fat. Some of my acquaintances have seriously asked me if I'm on steroids. It's all in the mind.

Well, I've been going to the gym for about five years now, but I still feel weak and small (in terms of muscles).

Sounds like you are either doing something really terribly wrong or you have a very warped perspective of your body. Posting some stats might be helpful.

I weigh 91kg right now, up from a low of 75kg 18 months ago. In that time, I've gotten a thicker waist and only marginally stronger. I can bench 100kg for 6, up from doing it as a single. I haven't tested my squat recently (last time I pushed it I did 140kg for 5), but my OHP (60kg for eight) and deadlift are both stagnant. My deadlift is particularly frustrating because I used to have a better deadlift - I maxed out at 195kg in 2019. Now, I can't even do 180kg, even using a belt, and I get lower back pain when I do so.

Over that 18 months I've also been fairly depressed. I never stopped going to the gym regularly, but I have fairly constant negative thoughts about my own weakness and laziness. As you said, I must be doing something terribly wrong, but I don't know what. I drink alcohol only rarely - about once a month, and I've probably only been genuinely drunk twice in the past year. I eat a lot of protein. My sleep schedule is uh, not much of a schedule because I work unusual hours. But 95% of the time, I'm sleeping 6-8 hours. I function terribly on low sleep so there's not really much of a choice.

Overall, I've been lifting for over five years. Over COVID lockdown, I did some bodyweight training at home, but not very consistently. I don't believe my perspective on my body is warped. I know plenty of people much stronger than me, some of whom have trained for substantially less time. And the thing is that I don't even care that much. I don't really hate the way I look, once I shed some fat I think I'll look okay. It's knowing that I could have more, and the only reason I don't is because of my laziness.

These seem like not amazing but not bad numbers. It would also be helpful to know how tall you are. Plugging them into symmetricstrength, I get intermediate on the edge of proficient, which is what I would expect given your description of motivation, training history, and lifestyle. I do tend to believe that the qualitative descriptions there line up pretty well with what I've observed in the gym. For intermediate: "The majority of those who go to the gym regularly fall into this category."

Are you sure the people you are comparing yourself to who are stronger are not more athletically gifted, younger, bigger, or on gear/TRT? It also depends on how old you are. If you not in your early 20s or a noob gains come at a glacial or negative pace eventually, especially if you aren't at a point in life to hit it supper hard.

Also, I guess its fine to pick random programs if your just trying random stuff out for fun. No one is forcing you to do power cleans. Pick a different program if you don't want to do them. I can't comment on the quality of the program and don't have the inclination to read the ebook. But based on the advertising, are you sure you had realistic expectations going in? It doesn't really look like the kind of thing that is engineered to work for intermediate natties. Like, why would you think that someone who is physically gifted and on a shit tone of gear would have particular skill at designing a cooky cutter program for average natty people? If you are just doing it for fun that's fine, but then I don't understand why you would be disappointed by the results.

If you are just doing it for fun that's fine, but then I don't understand why you would be disappointed by the results.

Well, it's not so much getting poor results on one program, but getting poor results on basically everything I've done over the past year. It makes me think the problem is with me, not the program. And I picked this because someone recommended it to me on Reddit.

I can't comment on the quality of the program and don't have the inclination to read the ebook. But based on the advertising, are you sure you had realistic expectations going in?

I rarely have any expectations doing anything, but sure, I thought I could have made some gains, instead of nothing.

These are not noob numbers. I would be ecstatic if I could bench 100 for 6.

What caused my past relationships to fail?

Why were there topics that neither I nor my partners could discuss without it leading to emotional scenes, covert battles, confusion and final withdrawal? It felt to me that if I ‘surrendered’ on an issue I was dismissed as a wimp, and if I ‘won’, I would have to pay for it later. I hated the conflicts and in the end hoped they would simply pass by, or I would ‘tread carefully’ so as not to upset things. The battles would pass – but then eventually, so would the relationship.

Why did I yearn to be with a woman when I was alone, and yet feel trapped when I was in a relationship with a woman and secretly yearn to be free again? Was it that I had to accept the bad times in a relationship on the basis of ‘this too will pass?’ or ‘that is the way it is – the ups and downs of life.’ In the end, like everyone else I knew, I had give up on relationships; it was just that some chose to stay in their relationships on the basis of it being as ‘good as it gets’. Others stayed because the thought of starting again was too much. I had chose to give up. I simply wasn’t willing to get to the same place of ‘stuckness’ and compromise, nor did I want to inflict that on anyone else.

As I now look back on these relationships I find it amazing how my attitudes and actions were formed by my social conditioning, and that those instilled beliefs, ‘truths’, ethics, values and morals inevitably ensured the failure of an unliveable ideal. I had simply been re-taught that which had caused the failure of men and women to live in peace and harmony since time immemorial. It became obvious that there was something dramatically wrong with the whole male-female relating business, and that the problem was universal. I simply played out, like a puppet on a string, ‘my’ particular role in a play that was pre-scripted to failure or, at best, a second-rate compromise.

It was only when I was finally with my current wife, with a firm, mutually agreed pact in place that I was able to experience, investigate and make sense of the full range of feelings and emotions that arise in a love relationship between a man and a woman. Then subtly things began to get a little awkward, which I first attributed to the radical issues we were discussing and my particularly chaotic and nomadic life at the time. But something else was at the root of the problems between us – something else was causing this ‘dis-ease’ I felt.

I found myself continuously bringing up the issue of her not wanting to live with me and would strongly question her motives for wanting to maintain her ‘independence’. I began to become jealous of her around other men and of her time when we weren’t together. We both started to get anxious about meeting times and some misunderstandings occurred because of this. Once I misunderstood something she said, didn’t bother to check, and took it completely the wrong way. By the time a few hours had passed, I had made a mountain out of a molehill, interpreted what she had said as her wanting to get out of the relationship, decided this is how women always treated me, and that I wasn’t going to stand for it any more! However, finally I came to my senses, thinking what a good boy I was as I had ‘seen’ an old pattern of mine. Little did I know that what I had ‘discovered’ was to prove to be but the tip of the iceberg. The final straw came as I waited to meet her one evening and she was late.

As the time ticked away, so my mind raced away, and after about thirty minutes I was furious. How could she be late? How could anything else, or anyone else, be more important in her life than me? As my fury built and built, as my mind churned over countless possibilities as to why she was late, suddenly I began to see the stupidity of it all. Here I was, comfortably sitting at a seaside café, cool drink in hand, looking at a spectacular sunset on warm summer’s evening. I’m involved in the adventure of a lifetime, I’ve found out more about what it is to be a human being in the last few months than I have in a lifetime, there is this wonderful woman in my life – and I’m being neurotic because she is thirty minutes late! Gradually I came out of it and was able to be where I was, delighting in the balmy evening air and the gaiety of the scene as the last of the beach-goers drifted home. When my wife arrived she apologized for being late, and I explained what had happened to me. We had a beach walk, dinner at a nearby restaurant, and tootled off home to bed.

Over the next few days something continued to nag me. Why was it that this relationship seemed to be going off the rails? Why, increasingly, were there misunderstandings, petty conflicts and difficulties between us? Why was I becoming more and more obsessed about what she was doing when we weren’t together, and what she was thinking about when we were together? Over the next days I contemplated on what was wrong and suddenly it dawned on me that, despite our matter-of-fact contract and investigations, we had fallen in love! We were both exhibiting the classic symptoms, emotions and feelings associated with being in love. I was battling her and trying to force my opinions on her. I realized that I had been jealous, possessive, pushy, demanding and obsessive with her. And, most appallingly, I saw how when the impossible demands of love are not fulfilled then it can all so quickly turn to disappointment, resentment, withdrawal, spite and eventually hate. It had got to the stage where it was obvious to me that, unless something changed, this relationship was heading exactly the same way as all my previous ones – doomed to failure.

So this where I am. The future is wide open, I have no way of knowing what will happen. As I've written before, my wife is already questioning love.

There are five character virtues which, when brought together, make a relationship magical. If all five are present and balanced (more on that in a moment), there will be joyful harmony, despite the woes and travails of life. If one is missing, the magic will disappear. If two or more are missing, the relationship will be toxic.

Each of these “Elements of Harmony,” when enacted by one party, banishes a different fear in the other:

  • Honesty banishes the fear of hidden things

  • Loyalty banishes the fear of ulterior purposes

  • Kindness banishes the fear of judgment, undeserved or deserved

  • Laughter banishes the fear of drama and seriousness

  • Generosity banishes the fear of lack and loss

If one party is doing all the “Honesty” or “Laughter” heavy lifting in a relationship, for example, the Elements are out of balance, and it’s probable the other has a fear which is not being assuaged. They can’t banish the other’s fear because they are not free from it themselves.

There are many ways to go against the Elements and thus against relationships. The most pernicious are what I call the Seeds of Discord, five forms of defensiveness or selfishness which strike at the heart of a relationship:

  • Deceit defends self from loss of control but selfishly robs the other of a true perspective

  • Hypocrisy defends self from loss of freedom but selfishly robs the other of a whole relationship

  • Slander defends self from loss of clarity but selfishly robs the other of a chance to be forgiven

  • Malice defends self from loss of will but selfishly robs the other of the slack to make an honest mistake

  • Envy defends self from the despair which comes from loss but selfishly robs the other of a sense of securely having.

These two lists of five, the Elements of Harmony and the Seeds of Discord, are particularly useful when used with a Fourth Step worksheet, such as those used by CoDependents Anonymous, Adult Children of Alcoholics, Families Anonymous, or Al-Anon (for lovers, friends, or family of alcoholics).

Here is a sample worksheet, a 7-page PDF, of which pages 4-7 can be printed out and worked on. If anything in here seems judgmental or religious or focused on failures, skip it; the goal isn’t to make you feel shameful or blamed, it’s to give you a safe space to discover your fears, resentments, self-judgments, self-betrayals, and motivated thinking, which hold you back from healthy and fulfilling relationships. Only when you live for shared purpose are you truly partners.

It became obvious that there was something dramatically wrong with the whole male-female relating business, and that the problem was universal.

It's so funny you say that because time and time again I find myself thinking that male-male relationships are universally fatally flawed (I'm a gay man) and to hear someone say the same about male-female relationships makes me question my priors regarding gay relationships. I think at the end of the day every relationship is going to require compromise and this compromise can make things seem less than ideal but it's just the best we've come up with so far.

As for the rest of your comment, I hate to sound like a broken record on these threads, but develop self esteem and learn gratitude for what you have and try to cultivate a charitable mindset that's realistic. Look at what you have that other people envy. Learn to appreciate it. When I imagine someone with something I want, and that they're miserable, it makes me hate that person. Don't be that person. Be the person who has what others want, and are grateful and happy for having it, not miserable that you don't have something slightly better.

You spiraled into self doubt when your partner was 30 minutes late because you are insecure in your ability to respond with grace and kindness toward yourself so you project it onto those around you. It is an immature and out of touch reaction so you should aim not to respond in immature and out of touch ways. When you are able to forgive yourself you can forgive those around you as well.

Why did I yearn to be with a woman when I was alone, and yet feel trapped when I was in a relationship with a woman and secretly yearn to be free again?

You wanted your relationship to fix the problems in your own mind, and when you brought someone into your life, she didn't fix them because you didn't have them worked out previously. She just highlighted your problems. Fix your inner issues on your own and then you'll be secure enough to have a woman who is fully human, as all women are, and not your imagined ideal of a woman who can fix every issue within you who doesn't exist.

Not sure what you’re looking for, but you have my condolences. Relationships have never been easy, but the modern world is extremely difficult to navigate when it comes to love. I wish you the best.