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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
If you want to recommend people purposely believe things that are false, then go ahead. Everyone copes differently. As for me and my house, we will serve The LORD.
As the adage goes, it’s cope or rope.
Hah, never heard this but I love it.
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Where is this coming from? It is always, objectively true that there will be more opportunities. That's not naive optimism or wishful thinking, it's the stark reality.
If you were talking more about the earlier paragraph (about being nonchalant) that is entirely subjective and cannot be right or wrong.
In a loose, almost meaningless sense, yes, there will always be more opportunities. The epistemic parameters that actually matter are 1.) What is the probability that my next attempt will succeed? and 2.) What is the probability that I will ever succeed? There are humans on Earth right now who's parameters are both essentially one, and humans on Earth who's parameters are both essentially zero. This means that these parameters need to be estimated empirically using Bayes's Theorem. You might object that you should "just turn your brain off bro" and ignore all this fancy reasoning stuff, but then you run the risk of ending up like this guy. Does this guy need to simply "move on" and remember that "it is always objectively true that there will be more opportunities"?
Now, this guy is not the median male. I myself have had better luck than him (I was able to get multiple actual dates!), so I'm comfortable saying that he's more than 1 standard deviation below the mean in terms of all-inclusive attractiveness. Is he more than 2 standard deviations below the mean? I'm honestly not sure. This is the buzzsaw that millions of young men are being tossed into with no warning by everyone's cheery platitudes. Enough. If we can't be honest on TheMotte of all places about what it's really like out there, then we can't be honest about it anywhere.
That guy, specifically, needs to remember that dating apps are a platform men are more interested in than women, and that he isn't going to succeed on them with whatever he has now. If you imagine every 'scene', very simply, just pairs up men and women matching in ordinal SMV rank starting from the top, in scenes with a lot more male interest than female interest, bottom-quartile men will not get any matches. He should pursue other opportunities, the kind in which most men succeed. Even very low 'SMV' men like the obese, poor, criminal, stupid, and awkward usually have sex and relationships, usually with similarly low SMV women of the same social class.
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Absolutely, yes, he needs to remember that there will be more opportunities, because that is the factual truth. Not just in an "almost meaningless sense" either. Perhaps he should change his strategy up, maybe dramatically, but to give up and say he's out of opportunities would be to deny reality.
It sounds like what you're really saying is that some people are too optimistic about their own chances. OK, sure, maybe they're too optimistic about their own chances barring major lifestyle changes, but reversed stupidity is not intelligence, and you can't turn around and say that this means that advice to "remember you'll always have more opportunities" is delusional.
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