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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
How to choose neighbourhoods
I live in a big city with a HCOL. My wife and I work demanding jobs, are in our early 30s, and we have 2 very young kids. We are starting to look for houses to buy and are trying to rationally weight the considerations to narrow down neighbourhoods. We used commute time, crime, and school quality to rule out most places, but for those that remain, what would you consider when planting roots for the next 10+ years?
So far, in addition to schools and commute, we've got:
Decent food (walkable groceries and take out restaurants). We spent some time without these amenities and it was rough.
Drive time out of the city. Its important to us to be near-ish to nature.
Census derived demographic data (income, race, poverty rate). I want the majority of our neighbours to be my race, class, and to the extent possible, my age and life circumstances (young families).
Distance from friends
What are we missing?
You can get groceries delivered. This realization eliminated a big time sink and stressor from my family life.
Is quiet important to your family? When my wife and I were house hunting there were large sections of the city that were intolerable because of traffic noise. Conversely, if you don't care about noise you can get a cheaper/better place by tolerating some.
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My wife just gave birth to a healthy baby boy yesterday. This is our second child, we also have a 2,5-year-old daughter.
How many other people here have children? If I remember past surveys of SSC and the SSC extended universe forums (ie. /r/themotte etc.), actually being a parent doesn't seem to be that common.
Two kids! One 2, one 4.
I've been playing A Short Hike with the older one and it's pretty cute - she's learning to read fast, partly because she really really wants to keep playing.
It's sort of like the Wii's "Go Vacation"?
It's not a multiplayer game, it's kind of just about exploring an island and talking to people. Well-written and quite relaxing, recommended.
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I have two, just like you, but about 10 years older.
Congratulations!
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Yes, we already went to see the mom and the baby with the older one today, when we left with the toddler I bought her a toy and we have another one waiting when the baby comes home.
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Congratulations! Wishing your family health and prosperity.
I’m in my early 30s and have a toddler. All the usual cliches apply about the experience thus far, and it’s certainly altered some of my political views.
Many of my friends, almost all who are liberal urbanites, have no plans to have children. I suspect a number of them might regret this later in life.
The only space I hear about anti-natal stuff is in the rat sphere. I have never really encountered it offline and I live in a liberal bubble.
The one guy I know that doesn't want to have kids doesn't because of mental health issues in his family that he doesn't want to propagate but even he seems to warming up to the idea.
As others have mentioned, there's plenty of just vanilla apathy.
I, unfortunately, have the same prediction /u/matt does. I've already seen one divorce because of a changed mind when it comes to kids, and my older coworkers who waited till their late 30s/early 40s to have them regret not starting earlier.
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Outside of the rat sphere there isn't really anti-natalism, but plenty of apathy around the idea of having children. I have many friends who just never got around to it (I was almost one of them), and I do worry about their future regrets.
Yes, I have many friends and acquaintances without children (many who do have children, too, of course), and only one of the childless ones can be described as an antinatalist. Quite commonly it just seems to be a function of not having a partner.
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Man, that's a big mood. I spent a long time being tortured by that very question. My parents have mental health issues, I have mental health issues, so can I really justify having a child who will almost certainly inherit those problems? It literally kept me up at night.
Thankfully the question got answered for me. My wife wound up having to get a hysterectomy, so we're not having biological kids (cause we sure as hell can't afford surrogacy).
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Switching to 531 for beginners this week as the bodybuilding program of doing heavy deadlifts and squats is not good in terms of recovery. Also sleeping and waking up at the same time each day now, the time is 9 pm ideally, 10 if the work is incomplete. I need to begin studying within 30 minutes of waking up, that is another rule I am gonna apply.
Theology is amazing and I am glad I found the Gita, the easiest way to describe it is with the lyrics of this song called "Drowning without you" by Fred V & Grafix (Do check it out). It calms my mind like nothing else and I know that no matter what happens, Lord Krishna is there for me like he was there for my ancestors. No amount of philosophy by any author can touch me like this stuff does. Reading theology and meditating calm my mind like nothing, I can feel time stop and experience God. There is a saying that the proof of divinity is in experiencing it's essence, it is a hindi thing so hard to say it in English but I am glad I found God.
Earlier, I would pray to get better at studying, now I try to get better at studying to show my faith. To take up pain and act, succeed as a showcase of my belief and love towards the Great Lord. I still am a degenerate who will do PUA stuff but my life has direction and no matter what I do, I have Divine Help so no need to worry about failing lol.
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Is any part of your body vibrating while you're praying and meditating? Or are you seeing bright lights behind your closed eyelids when you get at your absolute calmest?
How literal are you here? Is there an instant where you honestly could not tell how much time has passed? Like where you actually have to look at a clock because you couldn't know the difference between 3 seconds and 8 hours?
If not, you're underestimating God, and there are yet many more levels of divinity to find, each one more mind-blowing than the last.
And just to let you know that there's a pretty well-known level in the meditator's journey where people seem to get very zealous and evangelist. If you've discovered what seems like the most wonderful thing in the world, and can't bear to see your friends and loved ones not experience it too, be careful not to alienate them and be too annoying. In my experience evangelizing this stuff too aggressively pretty much never works, and you'll just seem weird to your friends.
My faith is personal. I am a beginner for now so I have not experienced the entirety of what is to be offered, No one does unless you are named Arjuna (Look up the vishwaroopam of Lord Krishna, Arjuna is given divine vision to experience divinity, he is overwhelmed, breaks down and is determined to fight the war).
It is a long long journey and I am just glad I have begun. Just need to be consistent daily and act better in other areas of my life to be a good devotee, praying has to be followed with action.
I do not preach to my friends or anyone, just writing here since this is one of the higher iq forums with religious people.
I do not meditate for long hours and for now just feel calmness, it is hard to describe how it feels, I did not do it for hours in end but I did feel a level of immersion I have not before but without any noise.
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I have the habit of attributing everything good about me to circumstances, luck or genetics but every failure it's my fault, my lack of dedication and my weakness. My unscientific hypothesis is that I don't trust my future self: it will disappoint me and will never be as good as my past self because the latter has not earned anything by himself but only by happenstance and will not be able to replicate this motions in the future. This lack of respect for the future self becomes lack of respect for my present self, because it is him who will become the deluding future self.
I would like to know how to respect myself more in the present but I don't even know what I would respect in my future self, I've never really had a role model or very engaged parents so I'm trying to navigate the world without a map or a compass. This lostness makes me want to puke; whenever I think of the future I see... nothing: not a desire, not an ideal life, not a dream come true, just an oppressive black.
Sigh, rant over, I suppose. I don't really know how to ask for help anymore, I just wish everything, or even anything, would start to make sense.
I haven't had issues as severe as yours, but it did take me years to develop a healthy enough ego to be assertive and realistic about my value. No promises they'll work for you but:
I looked at patterns that I'd seen repeatedly in my life - correlations that had been happening too often to dismiss. This could be consistent validation from others, success in difficult circumstances, or goals repeatedly met. You need to draw on those as happening to you because of you.
Attributing success to luck is healthy when you have a well-developed ego. Until then you need to look at it rationally with the above. How often can someone get lucky, realistically? Nobody ends up friendless and penniless on the street solely because of bad luck, nor successful because of great luck. This is a lie oft-repeated by those who haven't met enough people.
Attributing it to genetics is worse. It's a form of self-hatred. You've been given tools, sure. Dwelling on whether you deserve them on your fruits is - to put it bluntly - a huge fucking waste of time.
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Why do you care about what/who's fault it is? You have goals -- accomplish them or don't.
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