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 -
I turned 25 the other day. I was never a big fan of birthdays, but this milestone feels disturbing in a new way.
I’m not sure why I’m writing this. Probably not for advice, since it feels like I started to run in circles when it comes to that a while ago. Much of what I hear and think are just permutations of the same things, thoughts traveling along the same grooves. Can’t be helped, some problems don't really have solutions and the best you can do is shrug and keep moving forward.
As you get older, you get more familiar with the workings of your mind. I always had a contemplative bent, my day to day thoughts directed to something abstract or otherwise decidedly detached from my physical and social realities. It’s hard to see this part of me as either a virtue or a flaw, if anything it’s baffling that it’s not a universal human trait.
This bafflement is blunted into nearly nothing through sheer habituation. Again – I’m getting used to who I am. That is not to say that I have any profound insight to justify all of this activity, I merely describe the way I function. And it was inevitable that I found my way to the rock bottom. In the last couple of years I’m increasingly absorbed, then obsessed with the basics: the ultimate nature and destiny of myself and reality overall. The world, what can I see of it through senses and reason, feels terribly cramped and my heart demands something more in the strongest possible terms. I’m stepping carefully here because the last thing I’m interested in now is an argument about this kind of thing (if someone does start it I’m not going to engage) but basically I often find myself equally baffled both by religious and the autistic-secularist approaches you’re all very familiar with. Apparently some people just...don't care about what to me seems like the most important problems, or talk about them in ways that makes me suspect humans have truly vast variations in their cognitive architecture that is yet to be even slightly charted.
Based on posts similar to this one I made across the years, I notice some changes. I’m less of a drama-queen, I think. I found the intensity of negative feelings decreasing and I can make some decent guesses as to why: my self esteem growing through more grounded estimation of my faults and strengths, my naturally laid-back, nearly apathetic personality snuffing out teenage drama. Come to think of it, I was only alive for roughly 10 years total - the 15 years before that as barely conscious brat I can scarcely remember let alone relate must only be included as a technicality.
Put this way, putting myself together, on my own, to this extent, in this time, is pretty good.
I find it easier to chart and execute increasingly longer plans. I see that I can control a lot about how the next 5 years between 25 and thirty year old me unfold. But then again, "five years" ... "thirty", this fills me with disquiet. Five years is just…not a lot. And neither is 20, or 50 years. My flaws might not be all that severe, and I can do a lot to mend them, but time doesn’t stop. I already missed many milestones that are for good reason considered normal. In between the times I manage to psy-op/whip myself into some kind of useful activity (I'm getting better at this, thankfully) I'm stuck with a slight sense of unreality, of something being both subtly and severely "off". If I had to choose my favorite branch of Christianity I'd have to go with the Gnostics for suggesting there's an "outside" to this world that can eventually be accessed. So far I only see hints of it from time to time, in the corner of my eye, and I don't even have confidence that it's much more than wishful thinking.
Happy Birthday!
Untrue, I have had simialr issues since I was a child with following a routine and being a disciplined person. I have only ever failed but I am getting better and with enough time I will be fine. Psychological hangups that are environemnt dependent can be fixed. I was a complete dud with girls until I came here and did in fact change completely whilst no one I knew ever did.
Sun and Steel by Yukio Mishima has contemplations of his own spiraling.
I just got off a call with another ratioanlist adjacent motte guy who did in fact have simialr questions and found solace in dharmashastras and dharmasutras. Dharma is not religious, you can and should come up with your own model of this and act accordingly, that is what I am doing. These texts were prescriptions in the form of a live debate, not texts that are right due to a mandate of heaven.
I have had a similar path, just today I started spiralling where I ended up questioning the nature of reality after having thought about Lands work in my limited understanding, I ended up realising that I was mindfucking myself. You are correct to feel this way, I do too at times, my comment history is public here, I have written under 4 different accounts including this one.
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