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Wellness Wednesday for February 21, 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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Hey Wellness Wednesday, I've completely lost faith in the motte this week. See I've used "I think I fucked up my niece/nephew by playing a single song/tv show/movie" as a premise about a dozen times over the course of my life, and the only time it was taken seriously was with a group of college freshmen. Everyone else immediately understood that it was a premise, because you would have to be totally disconnected from reality to think a single piece of media reshaped someone's entire worldview. 100% disconnected, Being There disconnected.

But the thing is, I know the motte isn't full of freshmen, it's full of gen xers and millenials. And yet posting here was the second time my ridiculous premise was taken seriously. I used to make jokes 10 times as convoluted on /r/cwr and everyone got them, and when I'd do one on the motte I'd get accused of going for cheap laughs!

So it brought to mind a lot of other things I have noticed over the past few months, which can be summed up like this - I no longer believe I am stupider than the average motter. But, and this is the important part - I still know I'm a fucking idiot. Half of the cwr threads might as well be written by markov bots these days, there are still quite a few insightful comments every week, but so much of the rest is just rote bullshit. Just everyone talking down to each other, using passive aggressive laziness to evade the modhats - but not even making it entertaining, it's just talking points vs talking points.

I want to feel stupid again. I want to have to bring my a-game again. I don't know how to make that happen.

I'm going to chime in, too, because I was looking at this before nara, dammit!

I can't tell how many levels of irony you're on. It's kind of a moot point, given the "speaking plainly" rule. I don't have any reason to believe that you're trying to pull one over on those dumb idiots who can't comprehend your humor. And yet, users dipping into farce have a strange tendency to push that boundary. Please don't give me such a reason.

It was the Friday fun thread. I don't want anyone to feel bad in the Friday fun thread. This is not a speak plainly issue because the joke was only, in my eyes, a clear cut example of the issue of surface level engagement. It was in itself not a big deal, but it both made me think of a problem I had seen more and more and appeared to be a perfect example of it.

I made a mistake in this Wellness post. I forgot how highly smart people value their intelligence, and so my claim that I no longer felt stupid here is all anyone can focus on and has caused great injury. I am sorry. You should probably mod me. Threatening to shut down analogies and metaphors on the speak plainly rule is absurd.

No, no.

You’re allowed to cause great injury and/or post cringe. What you aren’t supposed to do is ironic stupidity.

Know the difference.

For clarity, acting as if I think something which even the people arguing with me about it down thread agree nobody ever thinks is ironic stupidity?

It sounds like an accurate label to me, yes.

Ironic as you’re “acting.” Stupid as “nobody ever thinks” it.