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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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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Notes -
Hmm. About the cult leaders: William Penn did something like this in 1670 with twelve jurors who went two days without food or drink, then spent nine weeks in jail because they refused to convict him. Bushel’s Case is the only one that I’m aware of, but I’m far from a historian. William Penn was a remarkably charismatic aristocrat…like the difference between, say, LeBron James or Michael Jordan and the second-string point guard for the Golden State Warriors, whose name you likely don’t know unless you follow basketball. Penn, however - unlike me - was doing what he did for some concept of the greater good. I cannot see how people like me having families and making more like me - more people who cause mild biological offense simply by existing, who activate systems of bias and prejudice almost as central to our nature as human beings as the feelings we feel about deformed people - feelings, I might add, that are either inborn or learned by six months of age. Months, not years. Six month old infants prefer attractive people to ugly ones. I can understand and accept that people like me ought to be celibate for the greater good, and should dedicate their lives to something prosocial in exchange for ordinary social inclusion. I understand the idea that we ought to be expected never to express a single shred of interest in sex or relationships, either: if we did, we might get the idea that we, like other “normal” people, had a right to shoot our shot (but not to never be rejected or some bullshit like that) like anyone else. There is value to that: we might become resentful and find ways to fuck up the social fabric that we all depend on or something.
I do not understand why we are encouraged to have relationships, given that it is likely that lights and sirens, institutions and social workers, tragedy and misery, will be involved. The best I can come up with is that I’ve earned some kind of dispensation by being a medical student, and people assume and hope that physicians can say “Not today” to personal misery and tragedy the same way they do for their hospital patients. Who knows: maybe we can figure out how to get good outcomes for our 400lb wives, or be good husbands and fathers if our wives decide to try and stab us, or some other miserable crap like that. And…maybe, and this is a hell of a stretch - I can’t quite understand - it’s better to contribute by making the next generation in these conditions than to be celibate.
I might have been exaggerating about the Mongols and ballerinas, but I think that people like this are maybe 95th percentile at best? The longbowmen I wasn’t joking about; John Smythe c. 1300 was an ordinary village blacksmith that could pull a 130lb bow and hit a dinner plate at a football field. Same with the barrel-maker in the next village over. This was ordinary. That is the ability that I think average people have. Someone that’s say, a salesman? Definitely comparable to a professional musician or something like that. And I have a friend that’s a professional musician, another that became a professional golfer. Know a couple guys that hold state powerlifting records.
You talk so much about your supposed ugliness. Have you posted a picture of yourself so far?
I talk about being unattractive. My physical appearance is...20th percentile, I'd say. Not Quasimodo, but not at all good. Add autism to that, and it's not looking good at all. I will contend that autism functions in more or less the same way as physical deformity or ugliness. Someone could watch me talking with my friends and form a durable opinion on my awkwardness after just a couple seconds. A single still photo would be enough.
Please show, don't tell.
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