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Wellness Wednesday for November 13, 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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It's not much different from before; I still am doing roughly the same amount of work but have had days off because of goofing around. I did start waking up early to workout so better on that front. I met a friend of mine who posts about medieval and sorta pre-modern times, and his point was that women are overrated in a way that

  1. They are hornier than you think and way hornier than you
  2. They can't have any grand sweeping plans or ideas about civilization

Now, I have never had a relationship since I am a broke founder living with my parents at 24, but more than that, I have met very few girls that I liked, and none live here. More than that, I know that right now, I need to be alone to fix my own issues. Not just productivity but also baseline discipline, better self-image, and some skills so that I can actually be employable and build upon that. Anyway, I don't get the skepticism my friend has.

I know Goethe had a fantasy about having a smart girl he would lie around with and the pillow talk would be about something intellectual. Anyway, most people I know have a different opinion but food for thought.

I have a deadline to finish my book and build parts of my first web app by this Saturday. See ya folks around, also don't text women in relationships or married, it is not wise.

They are hornier than you think and way hornier than you

They might be hornier than they have been socialized to be, but I sincerely doubt women are hornier than men on average. There are lots of studies that show that men watch more porn, want more sex, have more sex when it's man-on-man than women when it's woman-on-woman.

yep, mtf trans people report a higher sex drive universally which is why I could not believe it.

They can't have any grand sweeping plans or ideas about civilization

for an easy counter example that will not dox me and can be verified easily: take some politically active feminists

plenty of grand sweeping plans and ideas about civilization (yes, I disagree with basically all of them for modern ones active in Western world)

and way hornier than you

evidence as exists (including porn market) seems to also clearly falsify it

his point

why you thought it was worth posting?

My grandmother died at the start of the month, after a long year of close brushes with death. I wasn't there for the bitter end - I was in Sydney while she rotted away on the other side of the world, crippled by a tumour she would never get over.

The last time I ever saw her, it was over a call. She wasn't responsive enough to say anything or even give any indications that she was there, and it was disconcerting to see just how unrecognisable she was. The way she looked was halfway between human and mummified corpse. Her eyes were half-open and defocused, and her arm, now shaped like a long, attenuate claw, jerked up and down haphazardly. My family tried to convince me she could still hear and understand; they were almost certainly lying either to me or to themselves, drawing spurious correlations out of random noise so they could hope there was something there.

Even if she could hear me, everything I could say would just have been a pathetic insult. "How are you doing?" Terrible, thanks. "I hope people are taking care of you well." My catheter is uncomfortable, and the nurses won't do anything about it. "I've been pretty good on my end." Fuck off. I ended up telling her about my day, and the last thing I said to her was something laughably trivial and inconsequential, hilariously stupid in hindsight. There was nothing particularly graceful or poignant or even sad about it. I was never close to her - quite the opposite; she had done a good number of ethically questionable or downright repulsive things during her life - but seeing someone I once knew turn into a flesh puppet, flailing around aimlessly on the bed like a poorly rigged 3D model, was profoundly disturbing in a way that's hard to articulate.

Shortly after the call ended, a blackout fell over my apartment building. This had never happened here before, and it was night time so the entire room was blanketed in darkness - all there was to do was sit in the silence and think. Walking out into the corridor presented a scene from a horror movie; the halls of the building were lit with a strange liminal yellow-orange light, and the background hum of the building - which I usually take for granted - had completely died out. It took two or three hours for the power to come back on.

A couple hours after the call and the strange blackout, my grandmother died. It appears her husband took her death extremely badly. He initially seemed in denial about what had happened - he was surprised to realise her body was cold, and refused to let the undertakers take her away, snapping at anyone who tried. For a while he kissed and slept beside her deteriorating corpse, and by the time they managed to pry her away from him she was disintegrating so badly they had to rush out a cremation. Her ashes are now in an urn at the home she once lived.

Ever since then, this has popped up repeatedly in my mind. I'm not even in mourning - I'm more relieved that people can start moving on now, since everyone was being held in stasis for the longest time - rather, it's something else. I've thought about death a lot, but the existential dread of seeing someone wither away like that is really potent, and the weird, coincidental timing of the blackout doesn't help. I certainly won't try to find any meaning in it; that would be doing the same thing my family did when they insisted she could still understand, but this is probably one of the most terrifying coincidences that has happened in my life, and I am still rattled by it despite my agnostic nature.

I don't know if I should even post this, to be honest. If this comment gets deleted later, don't be surprised.

Bad month for Mottizen grandmothers I guess.

If it's any consolation, I spent the night of her death sitting by my grandmother's bed watching football and reading the Phaedo. I didn't feel that much better about the whole thing than you seem to. The funeral process largely felt like masking my autism about the whole thing. I'm happy that my grandmother moved on before much more was taken from her.

I'm sorry for your loss.

My Grandfather passed very recently. He lived a long life into his 90's. He just caught a chest infection one day and deteriorated quite quickly in hospital. He eventually just asked the doctors to stop treating him and switch to palliative care. After 3 days he passed away. He wasn't responsive once they switched to palliative care, being in something of a delirium.

My father did not take his passing well. This is partially because it's his last parent going and also because he himself is in hospital for chronic health conditions and couldn't attend the funeral. It was a bit of an existential crisis in the sense that myself and my siblings have realised that our father likely doesn't have many years left in him either.

For myself, I'm glad Grandfather passed relatively quickly without a long drawn out death from something like dementia. He had his faculties up to the end (with just some physical frailties) and was still driving himself around. He lived a good, long life and left behind a successful and loving family. I'd be lucky to follow his example.

I'm reluctant to post this last part because I don't expect anyone to take this seriously. I'm agnostic, but I sensed when my Grandfather passed. I was in a hyperfocused state doomscrolling at the time. I'm normally completely shut off from most of my emotions when I'm doing this, but I sensed a presence so I stopped what I was doing. I made a prayer for my Grandfather to commend him to God. I felt a warmth like a loving hug and knew he was saying goodbye and that he was fine. Then it was gone. Minutes later I got a text that Grandfather had passed 10 minutes ago. So that was a thing.

Like yourself there's a good chance I'll be deleting this one later on.

I'm reluctant to post this last part because I don't expect anyone to take this seriously.

Listen, I'm just a crazy spirit helping out my diety, so my opinion and $6 will get you a nice festive White Peppermint Mocha from Starbucks, but I take your experience as serious as a heart attack and completely believe that it happened to you exactly as you described it. In my own family my paternal grandmother was infamous for her presence in her home after she passed away until my grandfather joined her several years later. Both he and my uncle received occasional guidance from her and at least one direct message, usually when they were looking for something. Sounds woo woo and hokey, right? But how would you feel if you were wondering where that screw was that dropped out of your glasses and a thought came unbidden into your mind and said, "it's in the heel of your shoe!" It blew my grandfather's mind for sure. While I never had a personal experience involving her after her passing, it felt like she was hanging around the house to me, too. In fact, I'd say that her presence was palpable while he still lived. I've had many other personal experiences in my life as well, more than enough to satisfy my own questions about life, death, the afterlife, etc.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go torment some drunken writer/poet...

I offer my condolences to you and your family. One of my not so close relative had stage 4 pancreatic cancer and her last days were painful, she looked worse than a corpse, death was a better option than being alive.

Death comes for all, we can only be nice to ourselves and others who we have around, to those will be around us in the future. There is no good advice here besides things that have been regurgitated, I've myself never seen a family member I was very close to pass away despite being 24. My grandma passed away 20 years ago so I couldn't understand anything. One day she was reading me stories under the trees in our front yard, another day she was just gone.

You should post things here. A mistake I made before was weeping about emotional issues in front of girls I knew, this is a controversial take though I'll say it anyway, people need a place to vent anonymously. I post my life online so that I can be honest with my self and soon enough that can help me act the way I wish to in the world instead of lying because I wish to evade judgment. You should write all that you have out, helps a lot. I mention girls because I'd nearly weep in front of them whereas they needed me to be the guy they could share problems with. It's old fashioned but this is what I believe in.

This is why I support euthanasia.

These aren't the cases you really need euthanasia for, though. Morphine and all its more modern alternatives are some strong shit; we know how to handle physical pain right before the end. The metastasized tumors in my mother's lungs made her more and more tired for months, until she never woke up again, but with the pain counteracted there was no reason for her not to want to get as many awakenings as possible.

What we can't do anything about is mental suffering. My father's tumor went metastatic before treatment killed it, and its progeny recurred inside his skull, where the fight with them became an existential horror, crushing various chunks of his memories and personality one by one, leaving an increasingly confused and terrified remnant behind. I try to reassure myself that, a week or two before the end when his frequent screaming sessions changed from "Help! Help!" to "Hell! Hell!", it was surely only because he'd lost more fine motor control, not because he was making a deliberate evaluation of his situation.

I want legal euthanasia, with the explicit ability to create a medical directive that instructs and allows my family to be the ones to order euthanasia at some defined point after I'm too far gone to do so myself. There's a bit of a paradox in the fact that the only circumstances under which I'd want to kill myself are those where I would be non compos mentis and so both personally and legally unable to do it.

My condolences. You surely know this already, but if you are blessed enough to live long, you will see a similar tableau many times over--relatives, your own parents, acquaintances, and friends. I could quote a poem to you, and almost did just that as a reply, but it seems dull to do so.

Delete if you want but I think this site needs a bit more personal raw honesty about concrete matters and your post certainly qualifies.