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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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To be precise, a degree is a good investment because it signals the discipline you don't have (alongside a mid-tier or better IQ), allowing you to get certain types of entry-level jobs which require it.

If you have the discipline problem you say you do, then getting a generic degree will cost you more than most (that is necessary for the signal to be credible) and benefit you less (because you will suck at graduate jobs and be miserable until you are fired).

If you are doing a typical blue-collar job (solo trades jobs are different obviously), you are checking in with the boss multiple times a day. If you are doing a graduate professional job, you are checking in with the boss 2-3 times a week. (Scrum requires a daily check-in, but is only acceptable to programmers who see themselves as white-collar professionals because the daily Scrum call is explicitly not run by a manager. When the daily Scrum call is used as a tool for beating up slow developers, the Scrum team stops producing code and starts producing resumes). You can be productive with much less discipline if you are working closely with your boss.

If you are able to hack physically tough blue-collar jobs like construction, then your personal graduate wage premium is much smaller than it is for the average college attendee, who is a woman.