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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Food, Sex, and Shelter.
That the three of these things (and water) are so hard wired in as to be non-negotiable (with the exception of sex and a pseudo-exception of shelter) is why I think you see so much dishonesty around them.
Sex, more broadly, relationships, is the easy and obvious one. We all have the friend with the awful boyfriend/girlfriend that they just can't break up with. Many of us (myself included) have been that person at one time or another. Why not just cut and run? It's sex mixed up with emotional sunk-cost fallacy. This stuff has been fueling the music and movie industries since they began.
Shelter is a little weaker and less obvious, but you see it when people get evicted or when people refuse to move from obviously awful situations. I'm not referencing OP here. I have enough Appalachian Relations to know that people will talk a big game about "leaving this one horse town" but will also turn around and start spouting "but our history! is here" just as quickly. The inversion of this is NIMBYism in expensive enclaves in coastal cities. People tie a self-constructed history to land and dwellings. The truly ironic part is that everything material that actually services that "history" is utterly independent from the dwelling itself. No problem to take the pictures of grandma and grandaddy's old revolver. They fit in packing boxes just fine. I don't think anyone is really thinking, "Man those true 4x6 joists above the basement - I just can't go on without them" [^1]. But people invest their emotions in the the idea of a house, apartment, or dwelling of any kind.
Food, and associated weight problems, are almost as obvious as sex. Anyone who's dieted has probably encountered the self-delusion that is "cheat days" or "cheat meals." The sad fact is to really keep off the weight you have to fundamentally alter what and how you eat. Any even minor slip ups can really hold you back. Exercise is just as tainted by self-delusion and people fail to understand the adaptation principle. "I run three miles three times a week, and I've been doing it for three years!" Yep, and your body has become highly adapted to that overly specific and routine aerobic exercise. You're running those three miles incredibly efficiently compared to three years ago and, precisely because of that efficiency, burning nowhere near the calories you think you are.
I think that self-delusion and other cognitive failings occur so frequently with these areas because they have such a core place in human physiology. They're not negotiable. You can't ever put food / eating on hold for more than a few days. You can live outside, sort of, for a while but it gets debilitating. You definitely can remove sex as a component of your life but this is scene as so bizarre that's either (a) a religiously informed decision or (b) a horrible involuntary condition that may or may not make you a serial killer.
[^1]: Okay, seeing untrimmed 2x4s or 4x6s or anything like that would be really fucking cool, but I'm still not hauling them with me when I move to LA from Kentucky and rebranding myself as "Harlan Hazard"
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