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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What a question: Please communicate on a pseudonymous internet forum an idea that is difficult to communicate through rational language and concepts.
That said, here's my pick: Confidence, belief in oneself, manifesting, Amor Fati. The Romans called them personal genius or Tutelary deities which watched over cities and lineages, Roman Catholics adapted them to be tutelary saints, the Greeks thought special people had their Daimons of greater or lesser power, Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart has his personal god, The Secret has well The Secret, TRPers have frame or inner game, Yudkowsky has his Hero License, superstitious prots have notebooks and cross-stitches stating "I trust the next chapter because I know the author."
This state of mind is impossible to communicate directly, but as I get older I believe it is at the heart of all human achievement. What separates the successful lifter from the unsuccessful lifter is rarely programming and nutrition, but the lifter who believes that if he puts forth effort it will be rewarded by achievement. The worker who goes out to get a job believing jobs are hard to get fails, the worker who thinks it will happen succeeds. The single man who believes that women want him as much as he wants them is fighting girls off, the single man who believes that women don't want him cries about it into his discord chat. When I've taken tests like I was going to a little league baseball game, having fun, showing off my skills, I've crushed it; when I've gone into tests worried and anxious I've done poorly. Whether you think you can do it, or you think you can't do it, you're right.
Right now the whole universe seems to be bending itself to make a huge project I'm working on happen, and as long as I keep walking into every interaction believing this will happen, I think it is going to keep right on going and I'm going to achieve a massive personal success. I'm not superstitious, but I'm a little 'stitious. There's just no rational explanation available.
You can explain this to people over and over, but you have to feel it, balls to bones.
Isn't it just that generally successful people end up with lots of self-confidence?
To an extent, but there are also aspects of it that I've experienced personally, that there seems to be information communicated far below the level of the conscious mind that impacts outcomes to a huge extent.
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Anything referencing Things Fall Apart gets an upvote for me forever. You know Achebe was a powerful author when a nerdy white kid from the burbs is yelling "THIS YAM FARMER GETS IT" in 9th grade English.
Responding the original question: Practice comfort in uncertainty and paradox. Life is ultimately pointless and chaotic, but it's better to attempt to set order to it than to simply lean into the chaos. You will fail, but the trying also guarantees victory.
Gotta head over to my copywriting job at the fortune cookie plant...
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