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).
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Yesterday, I was indirectly reminded of an old classmate I had in 5th through 7th grade. Out of idle curiosity, I looked him up and found that he had died of a fentanyl overdose last year.
I hadn't really thought of him for decades, and we weren't all that close back then, so it didn't hit me particularly hard, but it did shock me a bit, since he didn't really seem the type. He was from a high-SES family, both parents being archaeologists, and in the same gifted classes as I was. His best friend from back then is an attorney now.
I wonder how people's lives go off the rails like this, even when they seem to have everything going for them.
Some people just seek out drugs in a terminally irrational way. People look for all sorts of explanations- maybe it’s childhood trauma, maybe it’s society, maybe it’s lack of meaning or maybe it’s something else. But sometimes it’s just the type of person, a person who is chronically unsatisfied, very high in sensation seeking, impulsive and short term in thinking, and low in insight. Addicts are often born, not made. Why? Because drugs feel good, that’s about all there is to it. Which makes the above a deadly trait in todays society thanks to Mexican drug gangs having essentially open access to the americas drug markets
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I've written about this before but people like to imagine that they're safe as long as they stay within the bounds of socially prescribed behaviour and have a reasonable amount of money. This is not true, there are tons of things that can debilitate you that society or modern medicine can do little about. Maybe a divorce leaves you broken and alone, maybe an illness leaves you with long term issues, maybe you develop a chronic health or pain condition as you age or after an accident, maybe you start self medicating stress with alcohol and you lose control?
There are a thousand mundane things that can make you worse of and potentially break you. It's easy to ignore or rationalise these things as consequences of mostly moral failures and that you would "solve" if you happened to be affected.
It's easy to say that one should walk a mile in someone's shoes before judging them but actually doing that is extremely mentally unpleasant. Ignoring all the risks of permanent/semipermanent intolerable suffering around you until you're directly affected is much easier and probably mentally healthier, even if it isn't very empathetic.
I'm not sure this is necessarily the case here. Doing fentanyl is pretty much the definition of being out of the bounds of proscribed behavior. There's a lot of people who all into fentanyl from life dealing them a harsh hand, but there's also no shortage that just fall into the path of trying then abusing harder and harder opiates. Seems a little premature to assume the man in this case is one or the other when both paths are very real.
Outside the bounds of prescribed behavior. It's a highly proscribed behavior, unless the fentanyl is prescribed.
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My point is that there are a thousand paths there even for upstanding citiziens, many starting due to things out of your control. The reason for failure to imagine them is because remaining wilfully ignorant of them is preferable, just like it is better to ignore the ignoble consequences of aging. We can often do little to nothing and it's a fucking horror show.
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Insecure attachment often plays a major part. Seemingly normal parents can have messed up, cold relationships with their children. This can cause a constant black cold pit in the soul of the child, which a lot of people try to salve with drugs. Once they get into the habit of patching up all the pains of life with drugs, they are physically and mentally addicted and from there the road to stronger and more dangerous things is short.
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