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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My interest in being around other people and socializing is nearing an all-time low. I feel like I’m far more motivated by logic/rationality/truth-seeking/optimization than the people I meet in person. I also seem to care far less about social approval than the people I meet. I’m just not motivated or energized enough to play the social games to get positive attention IRL and social media likes. A lot of interactions just seem like I’m pretending to be interested in something so the person I’m interacting with can pretend to like me. Consequently, I don’t have very many friends and my career progress is slower than the people I graduated with.
I’m not motivated much by work anymore because even when I improve something and do an excellent job it doesn’t get me very far. I see people put way less effort and thought into things but they get promotions because they are good at playing the social games/office politics.
Outside of a few places on the internet, like here, I don’t feel like there are many spaces that I can have conversations that are intellectually stimulating to me. Most people just aren’t interested in discussing rationality concepts or contrarian ideas.
How can I become more interested in socializing with other people and playing the social games? I’m currently content spending a lot of time in solitude, but I feel like eventually this lifestyle will take a toll on my mental health. It is already causing me to become more cynical and jaded about humanity.
Find a Toastmasters group which has people from STEM fields, and in addition to fascinating speeches and Table Topics, join the friend groups of the interesting people. It’s a janky hack, but it works great.
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