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Wellness Wednesday for January 31, 2024

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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I'd tell them that trying to chase after loose women is a bad plan, I'd tell them about the dangers of STDs, I'd tell them about how the world was better back when people tried not to sleep around, I'd tell them about how rough the dating market is...

Well, lemme tell you as someone that had a decent number of casual partners, I don't buy any of these things as actually being true, which is why they might not sound very persuasive. Loose women are fun, STI rates aren't actually very high among educated white and Asian women, I have no idea if the world was better when people tried not to sleep around, and the dating market doesn't seem so bad for a decent positioned guy. The main thing I would remind them of is that it's just not really all that exciting in the end. Lots of fuss over some mostly mediocre hookups. It's not that they're earthshattering events that are going to destroy your life when you somehow get HIV, it's that you're going to spend a lot of time and energy and not get very much out of it.

Of course, I don't actually expect to people able to convince anyone of that either. Male craving for sexual variety is so normal, so utterly banal, that it just has to be dealt with on its own terms. Character and virtue lie not in lacking an impulse, but in resisting it and doing the right thing anyway.