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Wellness Wednesday for March 27, 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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They were socializing, talking about the opposite sex cuties, talking about sports and fashion.

I wasn't doing that stuff. I was reading.

Today, I'm probably 99th percentile well-read but I rarely read new books. I can't decide if this is good or bad. I somewhat agree with Hanania's take that books suck:

https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-case-against-most-books

I don't know. For me, reading a bunch of books to get from 99 to 99.9 percentile might not make sense. But if you haven't read seminal works of literature then it probably makes sense to read some more instead of getting more hot takes off the internet.

I'm in a similar position to you, but I still read a few books a year. I was a voracious reader until I was about 16, reading multiple fiction books a week. I'd go to a library, check out 10 books from the kid's section, read about five, and return the others(sometimes weeks late, to my parents' chagrin).

Sometimes I still devour books in a similar manner, where I'll read hundreds of pages in a week. But that's a rare occurrence. I think that's mainly because it's difficult to find books I enjoy. The majority of books I start simply don't engage me, and I can often force my way through, but I'll probably just be reading a couple chapters a week when I have absolutely nothing better to do with my time. But when I find a book I really like, I make time for it. When I was a child, I had much lower standards and there were a lot of engrossing books.

Also, I don't think there's ever been a "classic" that I've really enjoyed. The closest would probably be Animal Farm, Dune, and Lord of the Rings, but those were still books I forced myself through. The books I burn through are the modern page turners, stuff like Cradle or Dungeon Crawler Carl that are really popular on Reddit and have tons of action and tension. Sometimes non-fiction too, I like Frans de Waal's pop sci on animal intelligence a lot.