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).
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Is there any way to give advice that I'm not aware of?
I have a good friend that should be doing well. He has a good job as a programmer working from home, his wife makes ok money as well, also working from home, and they have a healthy well behaved kid. They gross 230k. They rent a house because they have never saved enough to buy. They have one car despite the fact that it makes it difficult for either one of them to get away for a weekend to do something fun with friends.
When we first became friends I actually helped him discharge some medical debt and fixed his credit for him. I tried to get him a duplex in 2017 but he screwed up the loan application process and I lost interest.
They. Eat. Out. EVERY. MEAL! I think they probably spend 50k a year on it. When pressed he says, "neither one of us likes doing dishes." It is often a topic of fascination/conversation amongst our mutual acquaintances. We can't really understand how they never seem to have any money and this is the best reason we can come up with.
He also has a SERIOUS drinking problem that I have tried to talk to him about, and if I'm the one telling you you're drinking too much then it is a real problem. Our last 4 conversations this month have been about chess and about his drinking and that he should seriously think about going to rehab somewhere nice for a bit.
It finally caught up with him a few days ago and he got busted for a DUI. He passed the field sobriety test and then blew almost a .3... Shoot, a vampire could catch a pretty good buzz if he had encountered my friend on that particular evening. I hate to say something as cliché as "I hope this is a wakeup call" but I can't suppress that thought.
I've given him some advice on lawyering up and what to expect in that department, which he seems to be listening to. I can't help but think that there should have been some way to reach him before it got to this point. I think I'm a pretty persuasive guy, but it only seems to really work if I'm around someone 30 hours a week or more. I can't do that for him.
I suppose this turned into more of a venting session than I realized. Thanks for coming to my ted talk on the dangers of being a spendthrift drunk.
Yeah, I don't have a clear model of how people's priorities are set, but I think it happens at a very deep level over a long period of time. If you only see him sometimes, it's like you're nudging a boulder that is already moving downhill. You might be able to deflect its course by a degree or something, but by the time people are out of school and fully in their careers, we largely are who we are and it's quite hard to change it. That boulder keeps going.
It's good that you're trying, though. If he hits some kind of rock bottom, it might be at that point that he actually reflects on the things you've said to him.
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