site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   1099 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for March 5, 2025

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).

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Contact with reality can, of course, teach you positive or negative things. I honestly don't know if I'd have the character or love of the game to suck a lot more than I do right now. I'm right at the limit where every few weeks I have a day or two where I'm a little down about it. But then I briefly read /r/bjj, and there are always posts from guys talking about being there for two or three years and still describing their experience as similar to mine, no advancement or improvement, and I feel like 100% I would quit at that point. There exist people who just aren't gonna make it, and the red pill of bjj exposes that too. And maybe that they keep going is admirable, they're more zen than I am at getting worked over and over, they're more humble. But I was about three weeks in and already impatient and saying to myself "Ok if I don't hit a single sub in open mat before the end of January, I have to think about quitting." I can't imagine waiting for that moment for another six months, another year, and still bothering to try.

This is very me right now. I have a few months more experience than you, but I have a bad feeling that I've plateaued. I knew from the start that I don't have any special aptitude, but I'm starting to feel like I'll never rise above "target a handful of submissions I know and improvise the rest with bad instincts." I think I'll give it another month and seriously consider stepping back if I don't see some sort of improvement, even gradual.

Honestly, learning ankle locks probably hurt too, because it was the one thing I was genuinely good at, so I started shifting my whole game around them to the point of letting the rest of my game atrophy.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats