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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   2932 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for November 2, 2022

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:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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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Even though the OP specifies meeting likeminded people, I think what most lonely men need overall is just a group or community to regularly spend time with. Dancing helped me with that even after trying dozens of other activities and not liking any of them.

Eh, I think this is true only to an extent. I think spending time with a group or community that happens to radically differ from you in ideology and outlook, and speaks continuously about that ideology and outlook, can slowly drive you nuts. And I've noticed that there's a large group of people who treat politics as basically unavoidable and think of their beliefs as if it should be the default Good Person mode of thinking, so they usually never shut up about it and often don't even bother to try and introduce any balance to their view whatsoever.

I'm not saying one should create an echo chamber and only expose themselves to people who agree with them, but from experience I will say it's also probably a bad idea to throw yourself into spaces populated primarily by members of your outgroup and expect yourself to have a fantastic time.

I agree, I think baked into the idea of community is the idea that you respect and enjoy the company of the people around you.

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