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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This sounds normal to me. What upsets me viscerally is somewhat unpredictable, but the best predictor does seem to be the "selfish tears" aspect that you describe above. When I think about the incident you describe, I have the strongest sense of empathy for the husband, alone without his partner and grieving, trying to raise his child with the memory of his wife. In that, I see that what really upsets me is considering the possibility of losing my own wife. This is obviously a failure of empathy towards other people related to the story, but it ultimately is my sincere reaction.
I recently went back to listen to MartyrMade's Fear and Loathing in New Jerusalem to refresh myself on his perspective of the history of the conflict in the Levant. The opening is a dramatic telling of a pogrom from the perspective of a husband trying to shield his family from the situation, with the common refrain, "what would you do?". I find the whole thing pretty harrowing, and I think it's precisely because bringing this scene to life from the perspective of the man of the house makes it much more vivid for me than viewed from any other angle.
When it comes to the death of people whose time had come from old age, I generally lack any sense of grief, even for people that I care deeply about. When an octogenarian dies, it just isn't sad to me. I think of the good times I had with them, of their accomplishments and contribution to the world, and I want to celebrate what was bright about them, but I don't feel grief. I suspect that this difference from others contributed to my confusion at why other people cared about Covid so much more than I did.
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