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Wellness Wednesday for March 27, 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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Went to a nightclub today for the first time in a while. It went exactly how it's always gone: I hated it.

It's kind of amazing how much I hate it, really. The loud music, the lasers, the huge crowd, the stupid pop music that everyone else seems to know but I don't, the pressure to "dance," the complete lack of privacy, the fight to get a drink at the bar, the lines for the bathrooms. It's like hell for me.

And yet I keep coming back. I still have this fantasy that I can somehow stop being a shy, introverted nerd and turn into a cool guy who dances with babes at the club. Is that possible? Has anyone actually done that? I don't even care about getting laid (sorta) I just want to be happier and more "in the moment" instead of wasting my life thinking about weird abstract thoughts.

If you hate the music, crowd and dancing then this seems like a doomed project. It's one thing if you actually like dancing but are too shy to engage but if you dislike the core activity then this seems like a bad idea.

Surely there are other things for you to do?

Secondly, you don't mentioning going with with friends... Did you go alone? That seems like a really bad idea, for a ton of reasons, and I understand if you were miserable if you did. Step one for enjoying to go to the club should be going there and enjoying dancing with your friends.

Yeah the friends thing is probably a big part of it. I go alone, because I have no friends to go with. My "friends" are pretty much just online at this point. Either they live too far away, or they're too busy, or they have to wake up early tomorrow, or they've already been there and decided it sucked, or... yada yada yada. Finding friends to actually do stuff with me IRL is like pulling teeth. So I go places alone, hoping to meet people that way, but they're all locked into their friend circle, warning each other about "stranger danger" from weirdo loners like me.

Do some activity that requires interacting with other random people if you want to meet new people.

Attend a class, join book club/amateur sports team/an orchestra/a choir/etc or volunteer.

People go in to these activities primed to interact with strangers (as opposed to the opposite in something like a club) which makes it a million times easier to establish new friendships.