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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Gratitude is the first thing I've adopted from the stoics. But that's not something I actively work on a lot lately.
That's a mistake and definitely something I can try to address in my evening retrospective.
Generally incorporating the actual practice (the meat) of stoicism instead of the intellectual masturbation (potatoes) is the hardest part.
Stoicism is a great philosophy because it's perfect to pick and choose from. Even the ancient stoics did this. Seneca and Marcus Aurelius were big on the evening retrospective meditation - Epictetus was less focused on that type of narrow practice, and more focused on general mindset/mental tools such as negative visualization. He mentions it once or twice in the Enchiridion but only in passing whereas Seneca writes paragraphs about evening meditations.
Which part of stoicism would you consider the potatoes?
I completely botched that expression. Meat and potatoes are both fundamental.
I was trying to say: Actually doing it and applying the stoic tools every day is the hardest part. I much prefer, based on observation, to read about tools of thought than to apply them. Reading about how Seneca pleading his case at his own court every evening is easier to do then doing the same.
Simple ain't easy. :-)
I agree with that! It can be very difficult. I've found physical practices like meditation/yoga to have more sticking power than purely mental devices myself.
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