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).
Jump in the discussion.
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There are plenty of stories of wildly successful people who were failures in their early to mid lives. There are almost no things that are too late to turn around.
Winter in Alaska is tough, though. Someone in the Rational spaces (maybe Eliezer) noticed that his SAD light was rather, well, sad. He bought a ton more of them to actually get lumens equivalent to daylight everywhere in his living room, and it turned to be all he needed. So if the SAD light helps you, but not enough, why not try more dakka?
Parenthood? Dating for the first time? A career in physics (physicists all do their best work in their 20s, and are generally considered "over the hill" once they pass 30)?
Along the lines of that last one, how about an athletic career? Or obtaining military experience?
There's plenty of things one can end up too old to do.
I recently retired from 20 years in the US Navy. If this is something you truly want in your heart of hearts, I'd be happy to chat with you about your options, of which there are a number. I'm not interested in a debate about whether it's too late in life to do something if you're not actually interested in doing it.
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I won't commit myself to the project of enumerating counterexamples to all of these, but this specifically reminded me of the entertaining story of Paul Douglas, best known as Cobb's opposite number in the eponymous production function: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Douglas_(Illinois_politician)
That was WWII. I can't imagine the modern US military taking a 50-year old — it would require a rather serious war, and nowadays, you'd get the nukes flying long before it reaches that point.
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No to all three. You're way too fatalistic, dude (and I say that as someone with too big of a fatalism streak myself). You can do any, indeed all, of those things at older ages. Most people don't, but "rare" and "difficult" are not the same as "impossible".
Menopause and the rarity of "age gap" relationships — outside of elderly "sugar daddy" sorts — make parenthood incredibly implausible. Plus, try finding the energy to deal with teenagers when you're in your 60s or 70s.
And what's "awkward fumbling to be expected and forgiven as part of the learning process of forming relationships" in a teenager is often "creepy and a reason to call the police" for a balding 40-year-old man.
Cognitive decline for physics. Add schizophrenia and medication side effects. Plus, the entire field is in a slump right now.
Again: "rare" and "difficult" are not the same as "impossible". Nobody said that everything is equally as easy as you get older, simply that it can be done.
I'mma be real with you dude: you're approaching this whole thread (and your other thread about clubs, for that matter) in a supremely unhelpful way. When people give you advice about how to solve (insert problem here), you need to actually try to take the advice. Don't argue against every single thing everyone says to you, and don't continually shift the goalposts the way you have been. It's unhealthy for you, and it's just going to cause people to stop trying to help you. The vast majority of self improvement has to come from you believing that it's possible and trying to make it happen, and that's not feasible if you just shoot everyone down when they try to help.
I'll do that when they start giving advice that isn't totally useless to me and my situation.
I don't believe it's possible, and I think I have good, solid reasons for that belief. And all people like you provide are vague generalities and feel-good slogans, not solid, specific evidence against my view.
You need to consider that maybe your judgement of what is useful is flawed, and that people are actually giving you useful, actionable advice which you are rejecting because it doesn't fit with your preconceptions of what works and doesn't work.
Your only "advice" was that "rare" is not the same as "impossible" — which is the same sort of reasoning about very small probabilities that makes lotteries "a tax on stupidity."
Surviving your parachute failing to open when skydiving isn't literally impossible — a few lucky cases have managed to survive. But is counting on and building plans around that sort of extreme luck a good idea?
I'm pretty sure there's some bits from the Confucians — in keeping with the Master's refusal to discuss 怪力亂神 (strange occurrences, feats of miraculous strength, disorder, and spiritual beings) — about how life must be built upon the regular and predictable, and not around the rare exceptions. "Counting on a miracle" and investing in "not impossible" very-low-probability outcomes is, like playing the lottery, a poor strategy; indicative of several cognitive biases (difficulty with very small numbers, selection bias — you hear about the rare successes more than the many, many, many, many, many, many, many failures — optimism bias, sunk-cost fallacy once started…).
There are two problems with your argument here:
Trying to do something different with your life at an older age (such as having a kid, to use your earlier example) doesn't have catastrophic consequences if you don't succeed. It is entirely unlike gambling that you can survive a fall without a parachute. So there's not really a compelling reason to shoot down ideas and go "no, it's too late for me".
You are, by your own account, unhappy with certain aspects of your life. Your judgement might be good in some areas (presumably you're happy with how some things have gone), but not these areas. Therefore, if people are telling you "x will help your problems", and your judgement says otherwise, you are more likely to be wrong about this than they are.
And you're right, I didn't offer you advice. But why on earth should I, when all you have been doing is arguing with anyone who does? I'm simply trying to encourage you to stop biting people's heads off when they are trying to help you, and to actually try the things they suggest even if they strike you as unlikely to work. Frankly, the only legitimate objection you've had to any of the advice given to you was that you are medically advised not to do meditation. Fair enough. But otherwise, it's just been you dismissing good ideas out of hand without even trying them. If you want to change where you are in life, it's going to take things that you wouldn't have done up until now. So unless there are catastrophic consequences (like the meditation thing), your best bet is to just start trying things and see if they work for you or not.
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Sometimes called a lumenator. I recall it being Eliezer as well.
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