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Wellness Wednesday for September 28, 2022

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'm aware this is on the border of CW and Wellness, so if anyone has any problems with it being here, I'll move it to the normal CW thread.

The long and the short of it is that engaging with the academic discourse on a controversial CW-related topic is really starting to exhaust me and burn me out. I'm not going to introduce what the topic here is, since this is strictly Wellness-related, but I seem to have mentally taken it upon myself to refute the opponents of mine that are involved in the field. As a layman, I've basically endeavoured to take the strongest versions of their arguments possible, and then challenge them in a rigorous, data-driven fashion. And needless to say, acquainting yourself with an entire field is not easy (note also that I'm also researching a huge amount of other related topics which the aforementioned field is just a part of).

I foresee a bunch of questions about why I'm this invested, so I'll briefly explain. Why I'm doing this is because when I look at the field, I see a very dedicated group of ideologues who are committed to promoting a certain specific view, and whose acolytes have in the past actually engaged in very unethical behaviour (e.g. targeting people's careers, harassment, bomb threats, etc) in order to shut down an opposing view. Even those who do not do this have a clear ideological commitment and have endeavoured to find reasons to explain why measures other than the ones which find results that are congenial to their worldview are invalid or that they do not "explain the full story". This has been a decades-long effort on their part at this point, and most of the talking points offered up by them have subsequently either been proven to be untrue or did not have much validity in the first place, but they continue coming up with new, novel rationalisations as to why measures which conflict with their ideology should be thrown out. Some of the things I've read have been painfully slimy - examples of the type of duplicity I've come across from the aforementioned ideologues range from preselection of the sample to outright trying to misinterpret the findings of their own research in order to publish things which are congenial to the ideology, and these "findings" have then been repeated in subsequent publications. I also suspect there's a lot of publication bias going on, though I obviously can't prove that.

These ideologues' opponents in the field, comparatively, don't seem all that invested to me. They exhibit the air and attitude of people who simply discovered results that were contrary to their initial expectations, and decided to take them at face value and defended what they considered to be good social science. However, due to how influential these ideologues are and due to the almost constant stream of papers that group churns out, it's very difficult for anyone to properly address all their claims especially considering the fear of consequences that comes with opposing them. Worse yet, they're extremely prolific in responding to any challenges of their hypotheses, and basically flood the academic discourse with self-justifying screed after self-justifying screed. Someone has to contest them, but there's just not enough people who will do that, and most people seem indifferent or outright opposed to the idea of contradicting an accepted narrative.

My involvement in this is so intensely deep at this point that I have a reputation in certain circles on Reddit (or at least I like to think I have one, hah) for being fairly well-researched in one specific area. What happens now is that I semi-regularly get private messages from multiple different users about my general areas of political interest, and usually they're either asking me to help in an argument or showing me an academic's or activist's writings and asking me to refute them. I do not blame them and this wouldn't be that bad at all in isolation, but at this point I am getting my opponents' rhetoric shoved in my face almost constantly not only by my culture war opponents, but also those who are on my side (not to mention the media and every other vehicle of political propagandising that exists).

So the exhaustion has been piling up for a while. And recently, I got a message from a user who showed me a writeup from one of said ideologues in the aforementioned field and asked if I could refute it. I took a look, and trying to follow the citation trail led really deep, and it sent me into a spiral for some reason. It isn't the worst thing I've had to address, rather this just kind of feels like the straw that broke the camel's back. It's a symbol of "No matter how much effort you put in, nothing and no one is going to change. What are you even doing this for?" And it's true. I can't think of very many people who've changed their mind because I decided to throw a bunch of data at them. Additionally, what I'm doing is basically akin to pissing in the ocean since the more ideologically-motivated crap I refute, the more seems to crop up elsewhere and the cycle starts all over again. It's an endless memetic arms race and I'm simply outnumbered on all sides. I've realised this for a long time, but it was sheer stubborn principle which prevented me from ever backing down.

That can only last so long. At this point, I find myself really wanting to put in the time to refute it yet not being able to get myself to muster up the energy. Increasingly, I'm finding myself alienated from politics because of just how demanding it can be and how mutually exclusive it seems to be with any sort of even slightly fulfilling or productive existence. You need to breathe, eat and drink politics if you're going to actually do it properly, and even then the dent you're going to make is likely going to be minimal if not completely immaterial.

I've wanted to start something for a while outside of mere participation on social media (A youtube channel? A Substack? A book?), but I resolved to do it once I had refined my perspective enough to handle any challenges thrown my way with ease. But this simply isn't the case, and will probably never be the case. Especially not for someone who holds opinions that are as fringe as I do.

TL;DR: frustration, despair, long rant about how politics becomes an awfully soul-crushing thing if you get too deeply involved and especially if your view is a contrarian one. Yes, I'm painfully aware that I need to touch grass.

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

The atheist biology teacher at my catholic school said this was his favorite prayer.