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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The risks seem pretty high unless you have nothing to lose. But from my understanding you have a good career (and are moving to the UK and then maybe onward for further training/career stuff), a happy relationship with a girl that is (I think I remember) headed toward marriage, a book you’re writing etc.
The bad case (not worst, obviously, but we assume the worst is unlikely) for tren seems to be ending up as a bald musclehead with a bloated face and a worse psychological state, possibly with some long term medical issues. The best case is that you end up as a more muscular version of yourself, which I guess is better but doesn’t necessarily seem like it would improve your current life by that much.
Another comment lost to the
sands of timean untimely refresh. But I like/respect you enough to write it from memory one more time:You're correct in that the upside is limited, the question is how bad is the downside, because it's the delta between those two that should inform one's decision, with an appropriate amount of caution and epistemic humility.
As with most drugs, the side effects of tren can be mitigated by a low dose (of course the benefits go down too, yet it's not a linear tradeoff). I'm not aspiring to be the next Schwarzenegger, so a modest amount that's (maybe) unlikely to leave me a roid-raging maniac will more than do.
The thing is, there are other factors at play-
Being muscular is inherently good for you, muscle mass/proportion is one of the strongest negative predictors for all-cause mortality! I'd be lying if I said this was my primary motivation, especially given that I expect to either have been swiftly and unceremoniously killed by something else or just be outright biologically immortal by the time that's a real concern, but it's still a real and tangible benefit.
You have to consider the potential damage to your cardiovascular system from anabolic steroids, but if it's not obvious, it's not an obviously terrible tradeoff in a sensible regime.
It's the distribution between the two extremes that's provoking this discussion isn't it?
As with most illegal-ish substances, you're unlikely to notice the people who are using them judiciously. For every teeth grinding Adderall user stimming out, there's a dozen bored accountants or programmers using it to achieve incredible productivity. Similarly, for every roid rager out there, there's an unknown number of people who achieve a very respectable physique and keep it with relative ease, instead of becoming so grotesque or doing it on such rapid timescales that people notice and call them out. I'm confident the benefits grossly outweigh the costs for ADHD meds, especially since I take them myself, but I'm here to find out about the latter.
My career is doomed. So is yours, of course, but the number of years I expect to call myself a highly respectable and productive member of society are ticking down. Fast.
I expect doctors to be superannuated before I finish my training and become a Consultant like my family. I expect my job security to look increasingly tenuous in the 6 or 7 years of time it takes to get citizenship in the UK.
Worst of all, I don't even particularly want to go to the UK anymore. I still will, it's better than India, but my life there looks to be a struggle, and I'll consistently be looking longingly at the States, in case I'm still locked out for good. The very idea fills me with existential dread. Less dread and despair than the counterfactual case where I continue living the next few predictable years of my life in this blighted and benighted country, but an impoverished life nonetheless by the standards I had once held for myself.
I could have left ages ago, six or seven months if I hadn't procrastinated going through the motions before settling for giving yet more exams so I can start training as a psychiatrist instead of working as a humble Simia wardensis in a different country.
I am depressed, far from happy or even content. I should be stridently fighting with my med school and the ECFMG to get that bullshit sorted so I can fuck off to the US instead, or at least Australia/NZ, but I'm just so goddamn tired of it all. I'll do my best to try something next week, but I'm overwhelmed with bureaucratic bullshit from that same organization.
What's a book worth? It's a hobby, a more socially respectable one, that can maybe pay for a few beers, but it's more of a way to scream at the onrushing Machine God and tell the world that yes, this man of meat and flesh could write worth a damn while that meant something.
What elevates it from, say, just playing more video games? Believe it or not, people offered me money to do so, my storytelling skills and ability to be a close analogue to a DnD DM were worth something.
I'm still in that relationship, but as you can see, we have some serious, potentially irreconcilable differences when it comes to where we'd like to live. I'm quite confident you've read my AAQC essay, but if not, I'll link if you ask. It's a moot point right now, because I can't go to the nation I dream of even if I wanted to, not as a doctor at least, and even my attempts at learning to program ended when I realized just how fucked the average Indian programmer is when it comes to escaping abroad, and I simply lack the runway for that to be a reasonable aim any more.
In this case, I am both Sisyphus and the Doctor, the beetle forced to eat shit because it beats starving.
Don't worry, I'm not descending into utter nihilism or insanity like our buddy Skook, I pride myself on being fundamentally sane if nothing else. But yes, I think I'd like to look in the mirror and see some actual muscle before I turn to metal, be it as a paperclip or otherwise.
Will I make that tradeoff? Well, consider everything I've said and tell me it'll be the first; I walk into the unknown, yawning abyss to either side and a fraying rope to hold on to. That's life, and mine is still better than most even if I see great risk of that changing for the worst.
I have a better idea. Why don't you migrate to Chile? Serious question.
First off, doctors in the UK are middle class at best. You could go to Chile, work as a doctor, and easily be upper class or at worst upper middle class. You could live a far more prosperous life than in the UK. I am not joking. Doctors here are over-payed asf.
Not to mention, immigrating here should be much easier to achieve. The top universities here are desperate to take students from abroad to prop up their world rankings. I know an indian girl who is doing a phd program here.
And Chile is not a shithole, make no mistake. There is not other country I would move to, barring perhaps the US or Switzerland.
I mean, I've literally never considered the option, the closest I've even thought about in passing was Argentina, and that's got plenty of its own issues.
I would strongly prefer to live in an English-speaking country, do doctors there speak in English in your experience, or is it all Latin languages?
Unless further education nets me an enormous increase in salary, I feel deeply uncomfortable about taking time out from the short period of time I consider myself productively employed before AI takes my job or at least stops prospective employers from hiring more. Best guess for that is like 5 to 10 years, including lag time for people to wisen up.
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I guess I've been summoned: would you say that I am insane, or just nihilistic as all hell? Like, the basic premise of the Hock cashes out to "if you're an unattractive person/dude, whether it's because fugly or autistic or physically disabled or whatever, your partners are probably gonna find you disgusting. So you're asking for an awful lot there from your partner, arguably for no good goddamn reason. You kind of suck and are hypocritical if you're not down to freely choose to suffer like a motherfucker for no good reason - you're asking the same of your partner."
Maybe the Hock doesn't make you some kind of Chad, but surviving it sure as hell freezes some of certain kinds of hypocrisy off of you, as well as being a test of physical and mental fortitude. The Hock, like shit like climbing Everest or Navy SEAL Hell Week, seems to be most heavily loaded for high conscientiousness and low neuroticism.
Does it? The hypocritical (and nihilistic) interpretation, "I'm suffering and risking my life recklessly because I don't care about it, but I'd really like to find a partner who does care about me", seems like the generous one here. "Love someone who doesn't love himself" can be a bigger ask than "love someone fugly or" etc, but it's at least still a reasonable thing that can happen. Love is magic.
The alternative interpretation, "I do care about myself, this is just the level of risk and suffering that I consider appropriate for people I love", on the other hand, should make any prospective applicant for the position of "someone you love" (or worse, mother-to-your-loved-ones!) flee. There's magic and then there's foolishness.
There's a chance this will lead to self-improvement, I admit. I'm reminded of the stories of suicidal bridge jumpers who report thinking, on the way down, "all the problems that led me here really could have been solved, except for this last one". But presumably for every story from one such who got rescued there are more similar stories we'll never hear because the storyteller never made it. There's a thin line between "terrifying enough to reboot your brain" and "not terrifying enough to actually be lethal". If your brain has any reset button with a larger therapeutic index, I'd look into that one instead.
Is it not hypocritical to ask someone else to voluntarily subject herself to serious suffering, if you are not willing to voluntarily subject yourself to comparable suffering in turn?
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Basically: the Hock is a homebrew form of psychological chemo in your view. Its aim is to kill the neurosis or other bullshit before it kills the host as well.
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You're not certifiably insane, just crazy.
I recently discovered you and your Hock are a meme on the ACX discord, my man, it you end up as a lolcow on a rat-adjacent forum, you're doing something very wrong.
I have nothing new to say to your approach to your problems that hasn't been said before by me and others. Just workout and go camping, no need to risk death.
What do people there think about my plan to attempt this Hock?
You're a meme and it's a stupid idea. I can't say I disagree on the latter.
Anyone got an over/under on my odds of surviving this shit?
The odds aren't good, but the goods are odd indeed.
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I'd imagine the association between muscle mass and health is caused by a combination of 1) being unhealthy for other reasons causes you to exercise less and your metabolism to function less well, leading to lower muscle mass. 2) people who routinely exercise are more likely to be smart and upper-class and as a result take actions (eating well, seeing the doctor, hundreds of things) that lead to more health than the dumb and poor and 3) bridging the evolutionary mismatch between active hunter gatherer and sedentary modern. I don't think going from 'natty fit' to 'roided fit' will help with any of those!
A way to operationalize this: I'd be surprised if all cause mortality is significantly lower among people who specialize in strength/having big muscles than people who put a similar amount of effort into competitive sports. I'm not sure what all cause mortality looks like for people who are fit and exercise regularly vs people who are very fit and do competitive sports.
I agree that it's difficult to disentangle all the relevant confounders, especially since I haven't delved into the methodology of the studies myself.
But that's not the relevant comparison is it? In my case, it's going from "natty" chubby, to low-dose tren fit. I'm not aiming for delts as big as a coconut, far from it.
Hmm. Intuitively, I do not think that'll get you much of the health benefits of frequent exercise. No straining muscles, no increased heart rate, no natural stresses on bones and connective tissue, etc. Just a guess.
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It seems that you seem particularly concerned that India is doomed and will become hellish very soon due to mass automation and there’s nothing you can do other than escape, which you are unsure if you can (at least to the US) “in time” before this apocalypse occurs. I suppose I’m just not sure that hell awaits all Indians as a result of mass automation, and I’m even less sure that people of your class are going to pay the price if that hell awaits any large percentage of them. Certain doom for India isn’t guaranteed, I think, or necessarily even very likely. You and your girlfriend can live a very decent life in most of the UK as two doctors, even by middle class American standards. And mass automation, if it upends social systems, will upend many classes of worker before doctors, so whatever ultimate solution emerges will likely exist before your profession ceases to.
Perhaps your depression stems from another source than this supposedly inevitable AI-driven doom cycle?
I am concerned about near-term collapse in India, but it's by no means the only reason I'd be unhappy living here. While my family is now quite well off, we're far from the fuck you money needed to ensure stability if everything else falls apart around you. But I simply dislike living here, for what that's worth.
It isn't just the money, practising medicine in the UK has plenty of other issues. I strongly suggest you visit /r/DoctorsUK and sort by top for a year, it's deeply atypical for the majority of doctors to be that deeply unhappy/pissed, certainly when they're regularly striking over the course of a year.
i'm still going there, it's an improvement, if not a Pareto one, I just deeply wish I had better options already in hand. Let's see how it shakes out, as much as I might kvetch, I'm still committed to trying.
Almost certainly, I've been depressed for what, 7 or 8 years now? Well before AI risk was more than a theoretical concern. It's a bitter cycle of me having plenty of real reasons to feel sad/unhappy/frustrated, and the pre-existing depression only saps me of the will to do much about it. Worse, some issues like the one preventing me from currently giving the USMLE were unknown unknowns, I had no idea at the time that what I thought was a relatively inconsequential decision in terms of my med school would cause this much suffering, since I expected that despite it being mediocre at best I could just apply myself harder and get something better as a postgraduate trainee.
Oh well, I'm not dead yet, and I'm still rolling.
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