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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2087 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for October 16, 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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Does anyone else feel weirded out by their past?

Yes, absolutely. I spend more time than is healthy thinking, "what if..."

All the guys I hung out with morphed into generic stereotypes in many ways, happy but just very bland. All the girls I wanted to talk to at the time just to feel good about myself dont seem that attractive anymore.

My first thought reading this is that almost everybody looks like a generic stereotype when looked at from a distance. For the girls, maybe it was status that made you attracted. So, once you left that particular status hierarchy, the attraction left as well. (I am way less confident in the status idea than the stereotype idea)

I never had access, girls here aren't pretty. I spoke to probably close to 500 girls when I was out in a month's time or something. I had girls mentally shut out guys who were way more jacked and better looking and richer than me, ones good with girls and the same guys come up to me and tell me that I'm fucking awesome. This is the kinda stuff 19 year old me only saw in movies.

I'm very fortunate in many ways. It's not just status, I never had access. The nervous guy who would text those mediocre looking girls nervously is gone now, completely.

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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