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.
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Let's have The Motte take the Big Five (one of the better psychometric tests):
You can take it here online-- https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/IPIP-BFFM/
My own results, embedded below, come as little surprise to me. I'm a rather calm, stoic person most of the time, and I suppose I'd score even higher on the emotional stability aspect if I wasn't stable via the means of always being low-key depressed :( . I'm reasonably agreeable, or at the very least, spare my contentious side for this forum.
And my conscientiousness is pretty bad, but hey, if it wasn't obvious that I have ADHD..
(In case anyone is confused, intellect/imagination in this test is usually referred to as "openness to experience".)
/images/16946109072392786.webp
Unsurprising. The last thing seems to be "how smart do you think you are" (answer: I very much overestimate my abilities), though.
Doesn't the Big 5 usually contain neuroticism? Is that emotional stability? I typically get 99th percentile neuroticism on these tests.
I'm pretty sure they're just relabeling the clusters. Neuroticism is emotional stability, imagination is openness to experience.
My condolences. It's certainly not obvious from interacting with you, not that I think a forum like the Motte is a good way to gauge anything other than the openness to experience aspect, which can be quite blatant at times.
I suppose that I'm a fair representation of trading conscientiousness for raw intelligence, which got me pretty far in life, at least until the point I needed meds to keep up with med school, which to no one's surprise, is absolutely designed for high conscientiousness people.
My whole life I've played little mind games with myself to force myself to work. The only reason I graduated high school and college is because I'd use my overactive imagination and over-empathy to tell myself that my father would hate me and be disappointed in me forever if I didn't do well. Now in the workplace I do the same with my coworkers, "oh, this deal won't happen if I fuck this up", "what am I going to say to client if they call and ask where this is", "how upset is the MD going to look if I fail to complete this by tomorrow morning". In many cases they wouldn't even care that much, but I need to weave these narratives to be productive, essentially tricking myself into thinking my situation is a lot more desperate than it is.
I also didn't post about it here (or anywhere) because I was pretty ashamed, but I had an entire year a few years ago where I resigned from my then-current job after getting an offer somewhere else, ended up not starting (for a variety of reasons that didn't really have anything to do with me) and then did literally nothing for a year except play videogames, post here and walk around the city sometimes during the day. I wasn't even depressed, every day I'd tell myself 'hey, why not speak to those recruiters spamming you on LinkedIn, or to your old boss, or to your family', but I didn't want to, I was happy enough sitting on the couch. I lied to my parents about what I was doing (and I have my dad on LinkedIn, so it became pretty elaborate), my partner knew partially but was out working so saw less of it. I just couldn't bring myself to do anything. Fortunately I was saved when someone very kindly offered me (essentially) my job directly, bypassing the usual endless HR/recruiter process (I still had to it, but after the offer was made), and since I've been fine. But I terrify myself sometimes.
THE EXACT SAME THING HAPPENED TO ME. Wow! Except I didn’t leave for another job—I just quit with nothing lined up knowing I could probably easily get another job and needing to get away from what I was doing.
What I imagined I would do with all that free time compared to what I ended up doing with all that free time was a true blackpill. I now have proof that it is not a lack of time that is keeping me from reaching my personal goals; instead I now know that I don’t reach my personal goals because I’m a lazy, unfocused piece of shit who needs real consequences to make me do anything productive. So that was a fun lesson.
Like you, I too got rescued by an acquaintance who handed me my current job on a silver platter, though not as glorious as banking in London.
It’s a sad realization because I’m not sure what to do about it. I think it’s just who I am. People like us are capable of doing a lot, but only in desperate situations that are probably quite unpleasant, or when burdened with great responsibility (like being a single parent).
Interesting. It always seemed to me that society has always been composed of 1% that drives it, and the 99% that follows. And that 1% often gets frustrated because of that fact. This leads many in that intellectual and social engine to question the purpose of human life, which seems destined for suffering no matter how hard you try to avoid it, and with an inevitable end that truncates everything. And this leads to nihilism when it goes unchecked. It's important that we find a meaningful purpose in what we do or want to do, and for that, a period of societal hibernation is truly a luxury that everyone should afford at some point in their lives. Training, reading, traveling, wandering, thinking, and writing, especially today with the infinite resources available, is a very rewarding journey if the goal is to come out of hibernation as the best possible version of oneself.
Certainly happened to me. At some point, things turned around spectacularly in my life. Take it from a guy who was basically a bum for 2 years of his life.
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