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.
Notes -
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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