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 -
Suggestions:
A) Go to church. This is like my number one suggestion for half your problems, and particularly for being a semi-aimless 20-something. Pick one you like, but any church really that's close to you and has good attendance. Babtists to Quakers to Catholics to Jehovah's Witnesses to Muslims; nothing else will deliver on helping you on more fronts than becoming part of a religious community. Piety is a qualifying-skill you can demonstrate relatively easily (provided you don't pick a religion with really stupid opinions/rules, idk I could fake my way through Mormonism), and that's all you need along with being a generally nice friendly guy to have people like you at church.
Stop by and talk to the Pastor/Priest/Whatever and talk about getting involved and learning more; after you've attended services and bible studies and other events for a couple months start to share your story and people will be falling over themselves to help you, particularly in ways that also help them. Tons of rich people I know love to hire young down-on-their-luck coreligionists to help them out with around-the-house nonsense, yardwork or home maintenance or moving or shit like that and pay cash. There's also likely to be small business owners in the congregation who would love to hire a fellow parishioner, viewing them as more trustworthy both because of their faith and because they would face social opprobrium for stealing from someone else in the same church. And when you're applying for asylum, a letter from your pastor about how morally upstanding and involved you are in the community, along with a big ol' set of signatures from other church members, goes a long way.
It's also historically recommended as a great place to meet women, but don't fall into the autistic transactional view where you go to three choir practices and wonder where your fucking hot trad wife is already. You have to genuinely get involved and be involved before that's going to help you much.
B) Go to community college. Right now, today, go call your nearest community college and ask to speak to someone who can help you get started. It's so cheap as to be practical even if you aren't applying them towards a degree, if you do go to a non-elite university later you can quite likely translate at least some of the credits, it will help you get back into an academic mindset if you do go back to university, you will meet other people and have some structure to your life. Also a great place to meet women. Courses in anything will be good, courses on offer can be in anything from english to mechanics work, which can help you with a floor job. If at all practical for you I recommend:
C) Become an appliance repairman. If you're looking for a job with relatively low barriers to entry, decent pay, can be done on the side or part time if you move on to something else later, can be self-employed, and fairly recession proof, this is it. I manage a bunch of older rentals, I can't find anyone who does repairs on refrigerators/washing machines/dishwashers/stoves etc. When I can find someone, it is weeks until they can show up, and they want $150 to show up before we even see if a repair is possible, then $100+ an hour to fix it plus parts. And on top of that, most of these fuckers are ancient! Give it five years and another Corona variant, there won't be any of them left!
For most appliances, a $200 Harbor Freight toolset plus a $100 worth of odds and ends will get you through a majority of jobs. You can probably find training classes at your local community college. Appliance repair is an inferior good, demand goes up when the economy is bad because when the economy is good you'd just buy a new fridge but when inflation makes the fridge $4,000 and supply chain issues mean you won't get it for six months, you try to fix the old fridge. Once you get good at it, you can keep it up as a side hustle even if you get another "real" job or go to school (maybe just for your fellow parishioners at the church you joined? Word of mouth for this kind of thing can be huge! Lots of hustling tradesmen I know really only do friends-of-friends jobs and can't get the phone to stop ringing!).
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