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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Is it a terrible idea for me to move to Seattle?
This isn't an optimize-my-career question. I have ADD and trouble keeping my opinions to myself. I'm early 30's with an undergrad zoology degree, but I've wound up mostly selling phones and doing nightclub security on the side occasionally. I was living in Milwaukee when my heart got badly mutilated in october of 2019, and riiiight when I was starting to recover from that, COVID happened.
During COVID I fell in with an old friend who had been somewhat-similarly dispossessed, but it turned out later it was for a reason (they were both terrible). He and I wound up in a new social circle and his behavior became increasingly manic, unaccountable, and manipulative, and eventually, violent. It was probably classic Borderline Personality Disorder dirty-bomb self-destruction, but he did it all while being woke and black-ish, so he got away with way too much. I eventually won, but it was a pyrrhic victory.
I was so disgusted with the situation, and lockdowns still weren't over in chicago itself, I took an office job in the north woods. That turned out to not go great; I got downsized in september and the town I'm in is uniquely meth-y. Most of the people I see around me look diseased, physically or mentally or both. The dating pool is so garbage there should be warning signs posted.
But my younger brother lives in Seattle, Redmond, specifically. 4 years younger, we get along very well, he's a bit anxious and un-motivated. We play video games a lot together lately, I've talked to him about the idea, he likes it but acknowledges there's lots of logistical challenges.
Pros:
Cons:
IF you plan to stay long-term and can afford to buy a home, I would move to an expensive area due to the home appreciation, walkability, and other benefits.
...Why would I buy a home at the height of a real-estate bubble? Especially when I mention that I mostly sold phones up until COVID?
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You will be living in one of the top 5 most expensive cities in the United States. The floor for rent for a studio is $1500 and is still rising rapidly. The average restaurant meal for one is $20.
People in this area are very reserved and having a social life is harder. Being open to strangers is hard when there’s a high likelihood you end up engaging with a hostile insane person.
Wokeness is the least of your problems if you move to the Seattle area without a 100k job.
Redmond in particular is pretty boring if you’re used to the big city. Having access to the top tier trails in Washington is cool though. If I lived in Redmond I would hike all the time.
Is there somewhere within 20 minutes of Redmond that's particularly cheap and un-pretentious?
I'm not used to the big city, at this point, I'm used to the countryside. I just want to be somewhere that unattached women age 28-35 exist, where I can have a conversation that doesn't bore me to death, and I have pre-existing family to lean on socially. My plan is to get a quality D&D game going, and use that to network my way into selling psychedelic fungi to corpos. There's a sizable number of aspiring players but not enough DMs, and these are exactly the sorts of people who make ideal customers for shrooms. Festival kids and wooks are tiresome flakes, and overly-paranoid.
Redmond area is where Microsoft people live so it's going to be pretty expensive. To the south you can find cheaper housing in suburbs like Newcastle and Kent, and South Seattle is an option if you need to be closer to people who buy drugs but it's an awful and expensive place to live. None of these places really qualify as Big City despite the Big City prices. The closest Big City is Bellevue which is really more like a wealthy suburb with a small central zone inexplicably packed with skyscrapers, asian people and shitty overpriced restaurants.
As for dating, all I can say is that the Seattle Freeze is real. If you're on apps you're basically competing with tech worker salaries so you'll have to figure out where all the broke bitches at.
When I visited it didn't seem nearly so desolate. Can you describe Chicago? That way I can calibrate your analysis against mine.
I've never been to Chicago. I was comparing Bellevue and Redmond to Seattle proper.
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