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.
No email address required.
Notes -
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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