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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   1841 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for March 6, 2024

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).

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This is a good idea if you're regularly interacting with (or married to) someone into something you're not. But it's overkill if OP just wants more general conversational grease.

Moreover, unless he's willing to become a sports fan all the way, keeping up on the latest talking points will be a tedious waste of time. And he'll still end up bored and anxious of being discovered a fraud in sports talk. Honestly, if you want to make good sports small talk with someone, it's probably better to know nothing about sports than to pretend you care. Consider this opener.

You know, I haven't really kept up with college basketball in a few years. Which schools are doing well these days?

You'll get the sports fan talking! And you don't have to pretend you know or follow anything. Plus, a little understood phenomenon—you now have the conversation's steering wheel, while the other one gets to talk and like you for getting to talk. Once you start trying to demonstrate your own knowledge or insert your own talk tracks, you actually lose control.

Instead, you can take the converstaion where you want it to by asking questions. Like history? Interject with historical questions. Like strategy and theory? Ask a question about that. "So, how does a good team get good?..." Like the culture war? Ask about that. "You think ratings have changed since ESPN has gotten woke?"

Want to get off sports? Let him give you a little spiel, he'll like you for letting him talk. Then play a game with yourself to see how many questions takes you to X. Say, X is crypto. Sports... Sports Betting... Gambling... Crypto.

Unless, like in your scenario, the topic is regularly the center of the activity, there's no reason to pretend to like it or to learn about it just to make small talk. It will actually backfire (without a genuine interest) because you'll be bored AND worried about demonstrating your boring knowledge.

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