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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Notes -
Well, now that a few days have gone by and I'm mostly calmed down, let this be my epitaph. Or obituary. Or, well, memoir? Perhaps autobiography.
Maybe let's just call it what it is, which is two times too long and five times too personal. But let it be said that I ended my career here how I lived it.
I'd been increasingly feeling like my involvement in the Motte was a severe net-negative to my life, that it made me angrier, less tolerant, and far less happy. That undoubtedly had much to do with my deteriorating psychological problems which have, erm, graced this thread over the past few years. But I maintain it also had to do with the subtle but very real truth that discussing issues of intense controversy brings out the worst in people. I also suspect I just feel more strongly about the culture war than I did a few years ago, and in a more directly political way. I don't feel detached from the culture war in a sense amenable to discussion--I feel like a part of it. So the debates we have here felt increasingly personal, and unfortunately increasingly existential.
While I bear the lion's share of the attribution, I believe the Motte's uniquely diverse and unquestionably unusual userbase made this worse. I felt myself growing irrationally contemptuous of views and positions that have no impact on my real life, like particular permutations of transhumanism or various disputes concerning issues outside my own country and which have little impact upon it. I found myself getting mad at nothing.
I suppose you could say I lost a doctrinal war, in that I lost the mental and internal war against becoming mind-killed by the culture war, against being consumed by the sort of paranoia that motivated both the Kzer-Za and Kohr-Ah to sweep the galaxy in search of alien races and restrain them before they became threats.
Not only is this psychologically harmful to me, but it falls well below the standard against which I'd hold anyone else. So I decided it had become time to measure myself with the stick I measure others with, and take steps to change the media environment that shapes me. I would expect no less of some other person infected by the mind-virus of social media.
I expressed this view once in a well-received Wellness Wednesday post, and more recently, in a much-less-well-received Culture War Roundup post. I made the mistake of formulating my feelings in the shape of a rant rather than what it was, which was a sorrowful cry. I should have made it less inflammatory, and more conciliatory, though when I made it I was out of my mind distressed and irrationally upset about some recent threads. Because of the unfortunate and spiteful terminology I chose, it was (reasonably) interpreted as an attack rather than a lament.
Ultimately, I felt I needed to do something to draw a line in the sand on my participation here, and so I decided half-rationally to throw a tantrum and hope it made me feel less compelled to visit, as visiting here genuinely has been a compulsion of mine for a while. I probably should have been smart enough to tone down the culture war elements and put it in Wellness Wednesday, but I wasn't and I didn't.
I deal very poorly with embarrassment, so embarrassing myself on the Motte did the job of making this place viscerally uncomfortable for me, keeping me away. Right now I'm just taking the risk that explaining myself in less charged words won't remove that embarrassment, just make me feel less angry at myself. I think it's better for me if I just don't post, and don't read either. Both do me harm.
I think that gambit will be successful. The past few days where I'd not been browsing the Motte were genuinely refreshing, one of the best segments of time I've had in a while, though it had its challenges. This was probably helped by the fact that I visited my girlfriend, who I'm currently dating long-distance, and she is, well, she's not a crackpot the way I am. Plus, I think she actually loves me, which is good news for a crank like me who often thinks himself unlovable.
I began my journey on the Motte, if anyone remembers, as a struggling Christian looking for theological advice. This was rather an odd decision, given that this is decidedly not a religious space. It was very much like asking the wrong people the wrong question, as though I had gone to a synagogue and I asked about Jesus. But I have a track record of finding God in the wilderness--I gained faith at a secular college, which I'm pretty sure never happens. I guess I was hoping for lightning to strike twice.
Further, I was desperate. Distraught, even. I had serious concerns about my faith--not concerns that made me want to leave it, but concerns that made me wary of trusting the Church(es) as apologetic sources. I was hopeful that Christians accustomed to spending time in diverse intellectual spaces would have some sage advice, and maybe they could share some wisdom, to which I might attend.
This didn't really pan out, though I've definitely had a few positive connections in that vein since that time. But given the emphasis within Christianity on evangelism, I've been saddened since that early experience by the feeling that there were no Christians who wanted to offer help. Probably they didn't see it, or didn't know what to say. But it still hurt.
I felt like there were many Christians on the Motte who wanted play ballgame with revelation, but not to apply it to help a sojourner in a strange land who had been left for dead by life's troubles on the side of the road. I felt as though I had offered myself up on a silver platter to any missionary worth an ounce of salt, and no one bit.
But again, I was asking the wrong questions to the wrong audience. I was asking the choir how to get to band class. And ultimately, in my passion to answer questions put forth on the subject of religion, I became the same sort of flame-war-participant headed for flames that I so despised (in my perception) for spurning me in my distress.
Outwardly proud and pious, my insides grew as dead and cold as a whitewashed tomb. I had become, in my zeal, not only a broken fool but indeed the very worst among the sinners against which my religion warns. I became especially prickly about religious arguments after this, as I had no security in my own faith to support me when questioned. I was arguing from a base of confidence that no longer existed.
While they no longer exist on the live web, I stand by what I've said on the subject of religion (in the sense that I think I made an accurate assessment of the theological discourse in a defensible way that represents my honest view of the truth) but I don't have any interest in arguing the points. I don't feel that's constructive to my current state of faith, which should probably involve me shutting up and speaking more to God than to the internet.
Further, and this is sincerely secondary to those other concerns, but given the rise of AI and the evident use of web crawlers to gather text to plug into their algorithms (some in contravention of robots.txt), I'd also been feeling lately that any participation I have on online forums is just feeding more
blood to the blood godtext to the text-gobbler-industrial-complex that is AI training.Whether it leads to an AI legitimately believed to be an intelligent entity or not, I do think that generative AI will prove to change society in ways that will benefit some while harming others, just as I believe the automobile, mass media, and even computers themselves have done. I don't wish to have my text put in a place where it will obviously be plugged into training data for such an invention. I don't wish to contribute to it.
Given those constraints, I don't know that I would really want to participate in a public web forum in which I put effort into posting lots of precious text unless I got serious and obvious benefits from it, like Bernie-Madoff's-fake-numbers-level return-on-investment in terms of status or acceptance or joy or fellow feeling. Since the Motte has been net-negative for me for a long time, it's just a double whammy that makes me feel confident in my decision to back away.
This, in addition to my general desire to do something big to force myself to retreat from participating, made me want to overwrite all my posts. I'm sure it exists on a database or an archive somewhere, but I feel better having done as much as I can to obfuscate it on the live web.
With that being said, I'm happy to PM with anyone who wants to talk although my track record on actually being responsive is not good. I would especially value any Christians with Motte-like interests.
Anyway, that's what happened to urquan.
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