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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2271 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for October 9, 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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The urge that makes us social is a type of pleasure from preventing someone else getting what they want. It is equivalent to our will to power. However this can be deeply antisocial and in modern times you'll be excommunicated for stating the truth.

Wait what?? No it's not. On a fundamental level humans need allies. You don't get together with people just to harm them. Friendship is much closer to a stag hunt than a prisoner's dilemma.

The rational/evolutionary reason for wanting a social impulse is making allies. The mechanism by which that is implemented is crude.

Also just because you are denying them something they want does not mean you are making their life worse.

I don't know where you're getting this but it just isn't true. There are a thousand ways to interact with people and a thousand ways to derive enjoyment from those interactions. Sociality is how you win allies, find potential romantic partners, learn new information, make connections, etc.

I suppose in some very limited way there is some pleasure in denying others what they want, inasmuch as you're playing a status game, but that's quite a small fraction of the emotion involved in human interaction. At least for emotionally healthy people.

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