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 -
Have you finished your retirement calculation spreadsheet yet? If you're in the US, don't forget to take into account the fact that Social Security is expected to
run out of moneyreduce benefits by one-fifth in 2033. (Unfortunately, a cursory search indicates that nobody has set up a betting market for precisely when, or whether, this will happen.)More options
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General updates
Merry Christmas to the motte, I had a terrible week productivity-wise since I had friends around, sept super late and that fucked my productivity. I also injured my back doing some light rdls, and will resume working out soon, I will avoid rdls but I will still workout, despite shoulder and now lower back issues lol. I try do to 2 sits of meditation now, 24 minutes each instead of having small sits and just one long one.
I have been feeling a little sad for the past few days. I know I will feel better once I am more productive, but there is a sense of doom that I cannot quite articulate. I cannot feel happy about myself until I am better at what I do, but being sad about it just makes the process much worse. My work is now 7 hours a day, and I don't find any solace in other activities, though.
Book review of sorts - The Great Divorce by CS Lewis
I first heard Luke Smith bring up the voluntary nature of misery, how most people actively choose it willingly, the great divorce, the book I keep talking about was really impactful because it shed light on this. I have no memories from my life from when I was 16 to when I was 19 because I had been kicked out of school and was stuck in cram schools. Lewis described hell as an extremely small place, my own experience confirms this. My time spent in situations where I fucked myself over feels tiny and that is a kind of punishment I never would want to wish on anyone. Our ability to forget plays a big role in allowing us to attempt to change our lives or situations but it comes at a cost. Whenever I chose to do something where I acted, my perception of time expanded by large amounts.
My final 4 weeks in Thailand seemed to have lasted longer than the entirety of my university than my university or the year I spent LARPing as a founder because I actively went out and did things I would not have otherwise. The days I work most on seem to stretch out a lot, physically they don't seem to end, days when I slack off seem long at first but my total experience of the world is tiny and I can spend weeks in such a limbo and come out feeling like it all lasted just a few minutes.
We all have these rationalisations as to why we choose to do bad things, the book is full of interactions where you see them play out including a mother who clings to the death of her own child instead of letting go and reuniting with him in heaven. religious parents hammer home the concept of sins, of how sins in this life will affect the future ones and how the past ones already have had an effect on this one. Lewis presents the argument that the punishment begins now and like my own problem of losing sight of time or being numb is in fact me choosing hell actively, the rationalisations are just being cover-ups that I won't let go. All of the past sufferings can be neutralised, all it takes to do so is to simply choose to enter heaven and you don't need to die or convert to the Anglican church. It's as simple as it can be and we mostly choose otherwise and find ways to justify it.
Still, we all can choose to be redeemed at any moment, once we stop deifying our own thoughts, no matter how important we think they might be. There is a lot of what we call virtue that is universal, there are differences in morality for the ancient Greeks vs broader Indo-European religions and Christianity but a lot of it is the same that we all do wrong wilfully. I saw the recommendation of the book on the blogspot Real Social Dynamics ran, it's not a profound work on theology or a part of the Western canon that you cannot do without. It is very simple, accessible to all and one of the most relatable things I have ever read.
Book reviews are the laziest form of writing, I do wish to write more however and would appreciate if people can tell me what the correct way to go about it would be, I do not want to pollute the threads with large in-depth reviews and want to know what the recommendations for longer form material crossposted here from a substack are.
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Having a kettlebell at home is great for a lazy mf who doesn't like going to the gym. One of the best small purchases I've made in recent years.
Just ordered a new one that's 50% heavier. :)
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Feliz navidad!
A song that's been utterly spoiled for me by this parody.
lmao this is killing me. incredible art
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My family is opening a fertility/IVF clinic. Of all the logistical headaches you can run into in India, the question of whether to get a VPN so the gentlemen in the "Collection Room" can avail of some Pornhub™ (necessary because most porn sites are blocked in the country) or leave them to their own devices wasn't one I expected.
The alternative, getting some paper porno mags, is one where I wouldn't even know where to begin acquiring one these days. Not a conversation I have everyday, I tell ya.
There would seem to be clear synergies between your fertility clinic and a strip club. How about opening up one of those inside your clinic?
I'm afraid not many people are going to be willing to pay to watch me pole dance. Though they'd probably pay to get me to stop!
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A VPN will be $20/mo. Looping potentially mid DVDs, making people download porn to their phones (?) or having to rotate paper sounds miserable. With respect to my fellow commenters, those are bad solutions to the problem.
Rest assured we're not that cheap lol, it's just a rather unforseen and ridiculous problem to have to tackle when I just happened to be back home for Christmas. Arranging for jerk-off material isn't what I saw myself doing!
(I'm sure just about every Indian male has figured out how to get around the bans by now, but whatever happened to the power of imagination?)
I was actually going to make a joke about imagination. I distinctly remember the ability to easily handle things without a visual aid. I suspect your clinic would have a little less business if more men did too.
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Imagination is dead, for men anyway. I don't really know if imagination was ever a consistent way for men to get off, or if people kept records on that, but it probably is less used today than ever before.
Also https://youtube.com/watch?v=fQTOAWCpe44?si=eDG7ebQXX_kDQunV
For women, I think imagination is still alive and well. It's all about thinking up scenarios for them. Although I could imagine it's possible to get hooked on erotica to stimulate your mind's eye, I've never heard of any cases.
I mean, I can only speak for myself, but I managed easily enough that time I got chucked in the looney bin without porn access. Honestly, the bigger problem was the checks.
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Can't you ask people to bring their own entertainment? Everyone has a smartphone these days.
This isn't likely to be an actual problem in practise. "Don't you guys have phones?" I'm sure they'll manage, even if porn is technically banned, people have some idea about how to get around it, and if you've seen Indians being horny on the internet, it doesn't have to be visible nudity for someone to jerk it.
Worst case scenario, they can have their wife come in and lend an, uh, hand. No mouths, saliva isn't ideal for semen, but I'm not going to be standing and watching.
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Another alternative is to have a screen playing pornographic videos on loop. Japan sells lots of "gravure" DVDs on Amazon (though some of them aren't shipped to foreigners).
It would be an entertaining idea to have to argue with customs here about that kind of shipment at the very least.
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I wish them luck, there is a lot of pcos on the rise here lately, ivf clinics would be very helpful for many.
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