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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What strategies do Mottizens follow for a good social life?
Much has been written about the so-called “loneliness epidemic”.
Pew documents the decline in the number of close friends:
Similarly, Fast Company reports the decline of social clubs:
I chose that excerpt because I think it’s closest to the root cause. People back then had to choose between socialization and boredom. Now we have very good solo entertainment. Many would agree that something important has been lost in the exchange.
I’ve tried to fight this trend in my own life, with limited success. Even if you personally resist, your friends still need to choose to hang out with you, over, say, bingeing the latest TV show. As the decline of social clubs demonstrates, we social-seeking individuals now have fewer options.
One potential option is to embrace technology and socialize on the internet. I spend so much time on Twitter because I like talking to people.
What do you guys think?
I socialize online. It's the easiest place to find lonely people in need of love and devotion, and those are things I give freely in spades. It's not hard to find the people who just need a friend, or a lover, or a confidant, and its not hard to drastically improve the emotional health of those people.
You can typically form bonds as strong as you want them to be among such an audience, as long as you maneuver slowly and gently as not to spook them.
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It might be because I live in a city, but I've found the easiest way to socialise is just to invite people round to mine.
They enjoy not having to plan or host. I enjoy not having to travel or spend too much money.
Board games, film nights, drinks, house parties, dinner parties. I've found that people are looking for an excuse to meet up in person. If you
buildhost it, they will come.Having a girlfriend or wife who you live with also helps. I've outsourced a lot of my friendship maintenance to her. Plus our joint friendship group is larger than our individual ones.
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I’ve often thought that a part of the issue is that there are so few cheap/free entertainment options. If you don’t want to just hang out and watch tv at a friends place, or play a tabletop game, you’re generally going to have to spend $30 a person to go out on the cheap.
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My strategy is being so likeable that my friends insist on dragging me out to places even when my natural inclination is to nap at home and play video games when I'm not working or studying.
Sadly most of said friends have scattered to the four corners of the globe, but I'm moving too and don't really have issues making friends, though that gets difficult when you don't have an environment like college where you're forced to spend hours together and suffer through the same shit until you end up trauma-bonding. Most of the doctors at my workplace are (or now were) more senior to me, and the people at my level too busy with their own exams to have much in the way of a social life.
But I look forward to starting afresh, I don't have issues with making friends, and my sadness was mostly from what felt like Sisyphean struggles with no clear end in sight rather than because I miss human company too much. Said boulder has now reached a nice comfortable plateau, so I hope I can get out and see the scenery and drink my sorrows away.
And of course I'm here on The Motte because there are people I enjoy talking with, it's not a parasocial relationship because I genuinely end up, if not bosom friends, close enough that there plenty of people here I can hit up when either they or I are around.
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During the times when I did have a good social life, I participated in a lot of church activities.
Right now, I'm a bit overwhelmed with young children, a gestating baby, a full time job, on Saturdays we go on a family outing and possibly shopping, maybe see another family we're friends with; on Sundays we're mostly tired. Now it's spring, and the weather is finally warm, so we've started getting the yard in order a bit, and should work on some brush cutting and assembling a swing set someone gave us. Sometime we'll probably have enough energy to go back to church; I like the people well enough, there are soup suppers, ladies teas and what not going on that I could participate in.
Edit: Something else that occurs to me is that many of the good social situations I've found myself in have behind them a full time pastor, his wife, perhaps a deacon or other designated minister, and several organizationally capable women who do not have young children or a full time job (perhaps retired or a former housewife without much of a job). The ladies tea I could attend is run by an older but not yet elderly woman with grown children, who makes a dozen beautiful tea foods every month for fellowship purposes. Or educational settings with actual staff getting food for ongoing get-togethers that keep going as the student population changes.
People have noted before that these roles are undervalued in most modern communities. People mostly won't tith to support full time ministers, the "two income trap" will force women to work full time outside the home, and everyone will come home to reheat a frozen meal together, so there's less social infrastructure in place for anyone else to participate in.
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The two things I try to do most weeks to get me away from screens and into the real world are go to my running club and go to bar trivia with friends. I added board games with friends this year and it's been a nice additional plus. As a general introvert, that set of things pretty well suffices to make it feel like I'm not isolated.
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I'll say a few things.
-1 is having a family is far more detrimental to my ability to socialize than any and all technology. In my entire childhood, I don't recall my parents really ever doing anything social without it being related to their children. I at least hang out with friends about once a week. But with 3 kids, that's a ton!
My point here is that I think 'too much technology's is the wrong issue. It's young people not starting families that's changed. Any comparison between what single people in their 20s-30s are doing today vs 1985, is a weird comparison of we're not considering that they were having and raising kids in 1985.
-2. Have siblings close to you in age. Live nearby them as an adult. Built in social club. If you didn't get that, do it for your kids for fucks sake. Build a strong close knit family life, and provide whatever financial support you can to allow your kids to stay in the community as an adult.
-3. Get involved in your church. There's not a lot of substitute that get you a group of people who share your core values, orient their lives and worldviews around those values, ground them in a physical place visites weekly and build social clubs around this.
If you're a young adult get involved. My closest adult friends I met though young adult activities while single.
-4. Be a conservative, or more specifically a conservationist. Find something you believe in preserving and get involved with other people who want to preserve it. Maybe being an progressive activist can give the same thing here. I'm not sure.
-5. Run clubs.
I’m actually in a pretty similar situation.
Most of my days are spent with my coworkers (mostly all men) and then my wife, daughters, and nanny.
Next most time spent after that is with my family and at my tennis club.
People I would consider close personal friends I only spend time with maybe once or twice a month.
I’ve tried going to church a few times but it’s hard to get started. I’m a Catholic and it’s been a long time since my grandparents would take me with them as a kid.
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Creating and following a tradition. For over 12 years my friends and I made a weekly habit of meeting at a specific neighborhood bar every tuesday evening. Not everyone is there every week, sometimes life gets in the way, but being there is the expected default, and we can assume we're busy those evenings and try not to schedule anything else then.
Sure, once a week is nothing compared to the socializing people used to do, but most people I mention this tradition to seem to envy it.
How did it get started?
Nothing special really, my friends and I were mostly living in or around the same neighborhood, the bar in question was opened by a friend of ours and was the only pleasant place in the neighborhood, so it made for an obvious meeting place. Tuesday evenings were convenient for everyone the first few weeks, and after that we were just explicit in calling it our weekly tuesdays hangout. I think what helped is being explicit about it, and doing it on an "opt-out" rather than "opt-in" basis. There's also an open invitation to any friends, SO of the regulars. Anyone who wants to be there is welcome, but from the start we were already a stable core group of relatively mature and easygoing men, so there was little risk of personality clashes or drama spoiling it.
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All my (new) friends come from work, business, or hobbies, either first or second hand.
Hobby friends are better because you always have something to do or talk about. Vaccinating a hundred animals together is a better bonding experience than just "hanging out."
When I was little I made friends and even a boyfriend on the Internet, but it's been years since I've started any lasting relationships that way.
Meeting up with people from a forum used to be normal, but I cant imagine doing that with my Twitter mutuals, no offense to @aryancunnyrapist1488. Maybe because forums used to be for a specific hobby rather than an Everything social media site.
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