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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Building mental resilience
Ever since college, and stumbling into a lucrative sales job that asks absolutely nothing of my intellectual capacity, my brain has become mush, absolute mush. When even in years past - I’m now 28 - I would have made the token effort after dinner to open a book or write a passage in my journal, now I fall into a dull catatonia, mutely watching hour after hour of drivel on YouTube while absentmindedly swiping this way and that on a carousel of Bumble, Tinder and Hinge.
If it sounds pathetic, that’s because it is. So then why can’t I stop it?
Because every external marker is saying ‘you’re winning the game, keep doing what you’re doing.’ Making a lot of money working 25 hours a week, fully remotely from Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires and Valencia, sleeping with more women than is good for me. Writing it out sounds like a Reddit neckbeard’s fantasy, yet all the while I’m deeply unhappy with it.
Unhappy because I feel latent within me something potent but inaccessible, blocked by this 1000 pound gorilla that swats away any attempt to live beyond the sedating minimums of eating, sleeping and fucking.
All this is to say, how do you confront a personal acceptance of what feels like mediocrity? How do you retrain your brain to say ‘although you think you’re winning, you need to reset the rules of the game’?
Apologies for what may appear to come across as a blatant humble-brag - there's really no other way to make this post.
You've discovered what the luckiest and unluckiest people discover - life is inherently unsatisfactory, and nothing you chase in the world can give an ultimate sense of meaning, or fully take away the pain or ennui, or fill the black hole. Your mind is shaped by evolution to keep dangling carrots in front of your face. Never letting you have satisfaction for long, because if you did, you'd stop chasing. The way to break free from the prison the mind constantly builds is to look inward. More and more I'm seeing the truths in the Buddha's four truths of the noble ones. 1: there is unsatisfactoriness inherent to life. Birth, aging, sickness, death, bring the untrained mind into suffering. Even in great conditions like you currently have, there can be unsatisfactoriness. 2: the cause of unsatisfactoriness is craving, leading to clinging. 3: there is a way to stop craving. 4: that way is the eightfold path of the noble ones. :)
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I would say to get into the habit of scheduling those kinds of activities. I’ve recently taken up fiction writing, just for fun, but one thing I’ve found is that even though I like doing it, it’s hard to actually get down to it unless I schedule it and block out the time. It doesn’t have to be hours and hours, just enough to get started. Write in a journal for 15 minutes before bed. Read for half an hour after dinner. Whatever it might be. Even working out. Work out MWF for a set time. You’ll do it.
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There's a theme from other responses I would latch on to - improving relationships.
You're storing value right now in the form of currency and worldliness through travel. The tank you're not filling up, by serially hooking up and not being physically in one place, is goodwill from friends, family, and women that you can access when you need. Not to mention the general fulfillment that comes from being liked.
Perhaps you're doing this more than is clear from your post, but I just caught up with a world-traveling, highly successful friend that seems similar to you. I haven't seen him in 8 years. He's trying to shore this aspect of his life up and just got engaged, so take that for what it's worth.
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While it’s certainly true that this might make many people happy for a while, that (a) doesn’t mean it’s true for you and (b) doesn’t mean it’s true forever.
Sometimes it takes a great deal of courage to be honest with yourself about what you really want. I don’t know that I’m great at it. But the things that have often made people happy, which are a good marriage, raising children, finding (or building) a community, spending time with friends and so on are usually a good start.
A little advice: The greatest insights about your yourself always come from other people. No exception. Take special attention to the insights about yourself you get from those people who are very capable yet are not very close to you. If you are a relatively smart and imaginative person, it's pretty easy to tell which guys will amount to something. And who will become zeros. I am pretty sure you agree on that.
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Impose a change of routine on yourself so that you can't idly default into your unsatisfactory habits. I guess the simplest one would be to power off your networked devices for a time, maybe say for two hours after dinner. Then find out what your now unoccupied mind prompts you to do instead. Maybe you tidy up. Maybe you fix something you've been putting off. Maybe you go for a run, or start writing, or start the prep for tomorrow's meals. All fairly mediocre, but still a switch from passive to active. Or maybe you start planning your personal Hock.
Mediocrity isn't going to reject itself.
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Money food and girls is a large aspect of the project of life, but there are a lot of rough edges that remain to be smoothed out.
There are other attributes to max out or attempt to as well. What about your relationship with friend #4? What about family member # 6? How is your progress on hobby # 2? You get the idea.
Staying busy on multiple concurrent mini projects helped me by not allowing me to have too much time to ruminate.
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I had that feeling in my early career, settling down, marrying, and having kids has helped.
I also wrote an online story for a while and it got a good following, having people actively appreciate what I was doing felt better than just getting paid to do a job.
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There may be some unfulfilled part of your mind is inaccessible to the conscious mind. It is alerting you that you are ignoring it by manifesting as unhappiness. You could try to get in touch with that part of your mind through things like Internal Family Systems, Internal Double Crux, a therapist, or psychedelics.
Once you have a better idea of what this unfulfilled desire is then it should be much clearer what you need to do differently in your life to feel happy. It could potentially be a lack of some type of deeper connection with people and/or the world.
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