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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Notes -
Update on my economic and personal malaise. I wound up sticking with the beer line cleaning gig and got promoted to service tech faster than I found the motivation to job hunt (My self-imposed deadline there was Jan 1.). It wasn't great, but about another month in I improved at it enough that it became dead-easy and never difficult unless I slacked badly and backed myself into a deadline crunch to hit the bonus.
Apparently I interview better than I thought, as I was the "emotional choice" by the service manager who hired me (backed up by my immediate supervisor whose coattails are a good place to ride behind). This is good because I'm going to have to be the emotional choice a few more times until I earn myself a better resume. I'm not exactly brimming with excitement about the new position, but it's a rational step forward. If it goes well, I'll make enough money to make my life a bit more tolerable. At worst, I'll at least break even compared to the line cleaning gig (and I get a company truck, so I won't have to worry about commercial insurance and running my 15 year old car into the ground) and should make more money if by virtue of getting more hours if nothing else. Overtime is a useful antidote to crappy hourly pay. I care less about beer the older I get, but IMO learning how to fix anything to do with a draft system and demonstrating competence at it would be useful for the purposes of either moving into a gig with a distributor or making a career change into some other variety of repair work (I’m told that the usual career trajectory with this company is that people put in a year or so and then bail for a distributor with better pay/benefits.). I'm currently training for the new position at the company HQ for a month and my trainer is good. I like him, and he strikes me as doing a commendable job of being demanding enough that I actually learn quickly while not being an abrasive dick about it.
The not-so great news is that my suspicions about it not being a great pay boost appear likely to be correct. I was pulled aside by an assistant manager in my market and told not to take the job because the sales quota to actually earn commission is impossible to hit in my state's relatively poor, low-density market, and I likely wouldn’t be able to beat a retreat back into line cleaning without relocating unless the guy replacing me doesn’t pan out.). I don't know how it's all going to work because the company is presently restructuring the service department's role and pay structure. My first service meeting was...something, almost unnerving, dominated by 45 minutes of heated back and forth between a disgruntled tech and the new big boss/designated scapegoat about recent changes in pricing, low service call volume, and being diverted into non-billable (aka. line cleaning) work are going to fuck himself and several other technicians out of hitting commission right before Christmas (The consensus seems to be that said tech was badly lacking in tact, but wasn’t wrong.). I didn’t know that one could speak to a superior like that and remain employed outside of the restaurant industry or construction site (Then again, this is still food and beverage.).
I spoke with my trainer about this and got the following: The restructure is probably going to lead to his exiting the company, as it appears that it will badly limit his upward mobility within it (The management role he was being groomed for will no longer exist, and he’ll be stuck competing for other management roles that have far longer tenures with the company and thus deeper personal relationships with upper management.). The technicians’ complaints about changes in pricing and so on are valid. My predecessor (who was with the company for almost a decade) often missed the quota to make commission and he wishes he could’ve swapped markets with my predecessor to find out how much of that was him being too lazy/hungover to get out of bed on time versus the market itself being challenging.
Whatever happens, I figure that this is worth doing because even if it isn’t what I want to be it’s unlikely that I’ll wind up making less, and I need to push myself and become vastly more familiar with stepping outside of my comfort zone because being spending far too much time being overly comfortable, complacent, and okay with a mediocre but overpaid and easy job is how I got myself into the predicament of having mostly wasted the last ten years of my life in the first place.
How’s that for a segue into my personal life? It’s somewhere between “not great, but manageable” and “a falling apart disaster” depending on how neurotic I’m feeling on a given day (In therapy speak this means “I am struggling with emotional regulation and poor coping mechanisms that aggravate it.” or “I am presently realizing that I am not sufficiently functional to make the sort of life that I would like for myself. It only worked with the cushy delivery gig and easy financial situation.”). There was another roommate (I wasn’t looking, but it fell into my lap and I was sufficiently stupid/intoxicated at the time to agree without any vetting. 11PM on Friday night at the bar isn’t the best place to go roommate shopping, who would’ve guessed?). The good news is that I realized that she was insane (The worst alcoholic I’ve ever lived with and the most blindingly obvious case of Borderline Personality Disorder or something along those lines I’ve seen in almost a decade, one of three that I’ve met in my adult life that gave me the vibe of “RUN, NOW!”.), told her that she had to go, and after a few weeks of temper-tantrums and pleading left in peace.
The bad news is that between that, the job transition, and a rough Thanksgiving visit with my father I am a shaken-up mess in dire need of a hug/some serious reassurance. This is far from the first bad visit with my father but it just gets worse every time. He’s in his mid/late 50s and it’s now plainly apparent that if he makes it to retirement he’s going to drink himself to death within a few years or doing so, and that’s the optimistic timeline in which my stepmother’s codependence exceeds her self-respect (This is likely to remain the case.) such that she doesn’t leave him (If that happens, my sister will regret being his favorite child. I was our mother’s and she was/is awful, but is mostly the VA’s problem now.). There’s nothing I can do to stop it. The cool and adventurous if neglectful and a stereotypical bad divorcee (exceeded by my mother’s “monstrous divorcee” conduct such that I feared getting the Medea treatment long before I’d ever heard of the play) father that I grew up with is mostly gone, replaced with a rapidly deteriorating drunk whose only desires are to enrich Miller-Coors’ shareholders while chain-smoking and blasting Fox News in his garage or to go to the one bar in the godawful desert town he lives in where he is only tolerated because he throws tons of money at the bartenders. At least I didn’t have to defend him in a bar fight this time (Like fishing stories, that one grows more exaggerated with time; the latest version I’ve been told is that I brandished a barstool in his defense. I did nothing of the sort, just very loudly made it clear that we’re leaving and the fight was over, and if it had come to that I’d have gone for something less unwieldy as a weapon than a barstool.). Oh, and he’s hooked on crypto speculation now (and has made more on Dogecoin since the election than my entire debt burden. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being a touch jealous.). Yay.
I’m going to have a bunch of free time sitting in a hotel room during the workweeks for the rest of this month, feel desperately compelled to vent (That’s the polite term for emotionally vomiting on people/exploiting anyone willing to lend an ear as an unpaid therapist.), and need to stay away from the bars around here so it’s likely that /r/raisedbyborderlines is going to get the story about my mother burning down our house for the insurance money two weeks before Christmas and that the fine people are going to get my take on Hillbilly Elegy and Borderer honor culture as someone whose background was “Hillbilly Elegy, but in rural north Alabama and with more domestic violence and dead pets”.
Last thing: I feel a lot better having finished typing this out than I did as I was starting and doing it, like the storm has passed. I just feel tired now and am phoning this paragraph in. I am frustrated by the fact that I am not “over it”. This stuff comes and goes and sometimes I go long periods of being okay before getting smacked in the face with it all over again. I think it happens less as time passes or when my life is more in order. I’m going to make it.
Wow. I read the whole thing man. I feel for you, and tbh reading this made me feel less alone so thank you.
Feel free to message me if you ever want to talk.
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https://youtube.com/watch?v=H_XMqRhLhic
Amazing advice for those in their 20s.
I agree with everything they've said. It's excellent advice for the right audience.
Tl;dr - Find right peers, commit to girl, live under your means and take biggest risks your safety net will allow.
I turned 30 this year. A part of me feels great. I did all those things.
But, with that being said, I need to rant.
Rant ON:
Their audience is Americans without responsibilities. It's harder for immigrants with responsibilities.
This is what your 20s look like if you do everything right as an aspirational immigrant :
Do everything right, you still lose 7 years to responsibilities & immigration. I don't think any of these points as luxuries or high up on the hedonic treadmill.
I know Dalton and Michael caveated it for people with circumstances like being stuck in another country (presumably immigrants). But, it comes across as lip service. In Bay Area's 'high agency is everything' worldview, a person's reasons (as I outlined above) are equivalent to excuses. Everything that's not 'doing' is an excuse.
I rant because of their hard emphasis on '20s'. Nothing magically changes at 30. But the industry looks at you differently. In typical Gervais principle status economics, you can be classified as loser, sociopath or clueless. The terms are irrelevant. The crystallization of your status tier at 30 is important.
The immigrant self-sorts into 'clueless overperformer' through their 20s to get around logistical limitations and external responsibilities. They're aren't definitionally clueless. They see the hierarchy for the farce it is. But, they are shackled until they complete the 7-year ritual mentioned above. At 30, they decide to switch gears into the competent sociopaths that they actually are. But by then, it's too late. The opportunity has passed.
Naively, I wish we were a base 12 society. Aesthetics matter. 30 will remain an important turning point, because 30 has the right aesthetic. In a base 12 society, you'd have 36 base10 years to turn 30. That's enough time to stabilize your life & complete a full transition to Gervais' sociopath.
Ofc, it is wishful thinking. A truly high agency person can YOLO their way out of any impediment.
Afterall - "Kal karo so aaj. Aaj karo so ab."
IMO most immigrants I know (all of them are in software development, so very narrow selection) are doing much better than majority of their home bred peers. Yeah, you lose a couple years in grad school, but you're also jumping straight into a high paying job that puts you into the 80th percentile for income. Even in your example, the aspirational immigrant is entering their 30s with a '$300k buffer', that puts you ahead majority of Americans. The only aspect that immigrants lack at is social - most don't have great social groups or romantic relationships, but I don't think that can be excused to the immigrant hardships to the full extent. Plenty of my American friends in their mid 20s have few friends and maybe 1-2 (if any) relationships under their belt, so I think that's just how current generation is.
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the same, I am able to crank out 3 hours or more easily and will start doing front-end stuff besides math and boot.dev this week, this will bump me up from 2-3 to about 4.5-6 hours of focused work daily. I have been regressing a little bit but I did not have any days of zero work. I do feel a sense of slight unease since I stopped taking Concerta so will schedule an appointment. I will experiment with 72 milligrams to see how I react to it since I was on 36 milligrams.
I had one day of skipped work which was today. I do appreciate the support I got last week about my thread about the deaht of the danish backpackers I befriended. Will check in next week to see if I did end up working the amount I am aiming for. Math academy is worth the 50 dollars, its half of what I am given each month by my parents but I really like it.
Rotator Cuff issues
I got a partial tear in my right rotator cuff 6 months ago and have been skipping the PT I have to do at home. Has anyone had shoulder issues, what was the recovery like? The physio thinks that I will be 100 percent by the end of January but I am skeptical, in my head, I am always worried that I would rip it off for good if I go hard so I have mostly progressed in movements besides the chest press or lat pulldowns since I purposefully use lighter weight for them.
Don't do this. The physical therapy is what is going to help you. Does your physical therapist know you're also lifting weights?
He recommended it to me lol, he was the one who diagnosed my tear and got me to take an mri. I should not skip, you are correct, I will do it every night before sleeping.sleeping.
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Woah, isn't that a high dose ? Don't mean to sound alarmist. Genuinely curious.
Yes. Was it because of a dislocation, subluxation or another injury?
I've had routine subluxations during climbing. Every time I've gotten injured, my last words have been "watch me get injured". Unlike some other muscles, shoulder injuries are rarely sudden. 100% of the time, Bad sleep + Cold body + Stupidity = Shoulder injury/
Strengthening my rotator cuff + scapula has helped a lot. I do a bunch of cable exercises with low weights for my shoulder. Internal rotation, external rotation, face pulls & dead hangs -> arch hangs, cat-camels, scapular shrugs. For standard exercises, I've moved to using dumb-bells exclusively. It recruits stabilizers and makes it easy to bail from dangerous situations.
Yeah, highest you get, anything beyond this is obtained by taking smaller doses together
Subluxation I guess. Please do recommend the exercises you do, climbing requires shoulders to be ok. In my case, I already had a bad left shoulder that would make noises and move in the socket, I kept doing super deep Pullovers to failure and ended up having a partial tear on my healthy shoulder.
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Is there anything else I can try or steps that I'm missing in remedying a chronically blocked nose?
I don't have a runny nose, a cough, any other sign of infection or the itchy red eyes and puffiness I'd associate with an allergy. I've tried waiting it out, I've tried nasal rinses and steam inhalation, I've tried aromatic decongestants like eucalyptus oil and eating onions and pickled chillies (more effective than I'd expect, and tasty too), and I've tried anti-inflammatories like ibuprofen and paracetamol. So far the most effective remedies have been pickled chillies and paracetamol but it's not healthy to take paracetamol daily. If I stack them all together I can sometimes get it to ease off for a few weeks before it slowly creeps back to where it was.
I think my next move is to try antihistamines to rule out an allergy and then if that doesn't work book a doctor's appointment. I might ask a pharmacist but I'm not sure what over-the-counter remedies they can suggest that I haven't already thought of.
Seconding the nasal irrigation with salty water, maybe also very dilute topical disinfectants like povidone iodine. There are lots of weird little crannies in the sinuses, and a biofilm like a stuffed-up nose is a great place to host a self-perpetuating infection.
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Out of curiosity, why would your last choice (rather than first) be a doctor's appointment?
Because a blocked nose is way down on the bottom rung of health problems next to stubbed toes and trapped wind.
I think it's reasonable to exhaust the low cost low effort options so that the doctor can calibrate to an appropriate level of examination and treatment. They're not going to refer me to an ENT for an endoscopy if the problem is that I work in a saw mill, sleep in a haystack, and the only thing I've tried is a 5G crystal amulet I bought from a friendly gypsy.
A runny nose, sure, not a big deal, but any chronic condition bears investigation.
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Jal Neti or nose irrigation changed my life and is one thing I recommend. I have a partially deviated septum, stomahc issues that cause acid reflux to hit my throat so I get a sore throat very routinely. Jal Neti helps me avoid all that and chronic sinus issues. I do it daily at least once, upon waking up when I am healthy and it is the one thing from ayurveda I vouch for.
Do get chcked by a doctor though if it persists. A friend of mine had issues with his own blocked nose for months and due to some calcification and viruses, he now has to surgically get some of it fixed. Do let us know if the suggestions here work out. I would be happy to help you with irrigation stuff.
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Human nostrils take turns being easy and hard to breathe through every 25 minutes to four hours.
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Seems to me you have allergies. I would book an appointment with an allergist and have them test you. You can get allergy shots which can make a big difference. (And it will help you get over a fear of needles if you have one.)
Have you tried actual decongestants, i.e. pseudoephedrine? When I have sinus congestion it's the only thing that makes a difference.
I understand you're trying the things that have come to mind, but your post is kind of funny to me. "I seem to have allergies. I've tried bloodletting, trepanning, nightshade, and drinking my own urine. I've considered drinking alcohol, but I understand it's dangerous to do it every day. Is there anything else I should try?"
Perhaps, hence anti-histamines and a chat with a pharmacist being my next step, but I don't have any other allergy symptoms at all.
I can see the funny side but all those things do work, just not enough. Yeah onions and chillies are funny (Dr Shrek will see you now) but you can't deny they have an immediate effect on anyone's nose and throat.
I've tried pseudoephedrine and it had little effect beyond making my hands and feet cold and leaving me feeling like I'd had one too many espressos. That might have been worth it if it also felt like a crisp Arctic wind blowing through my face but sadly not, it's more like about 25% of the positive effect of paracetamol.
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You could just have nasal polyps, i.e., growths in your nose. A doctor can burn them.
That's the direction my train of thought is heading but I'll need the doctor to diagnose. I just want to exhaust my efforts before I go there only to have them say "come back when you've tried this list of over the counter remedies".
My recommendation would still be to go to a doctor.
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Does ibuprofen have any adverse effects on you, like difficulty breathing?
No, I've never heard of that.
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