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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Notes -
It's a line from the film The Princess Bride, which I have shown to my two sons, albeit when they were younger. A fun movie. (You may already know this )
Having written that, I admit that the line does resonate as a bitter truth, but not in any sort of complete version. For some, I have little doubt that life is almost completely pain, unforgiving, constant, merciless. I would like to think even for those people there are moments of calm, or peace, even happiness--or, if I really push it, beauty, though that may be too optimistic. And certainly I have had years, particularly my teens, where everything seemed rotten inside, people seemed rotten, false, groups even worse, all the world a shithole, full of liars and thieves and brutality. And you do not need to look far to find people, even adults, who will nod in agreement to all that.
I'm not going to attempt to lay out the glory here or convince you of life's endless bounty. But having kids--even when I know someday one or both of them may have to watch me, as I watched my own father, die in a weakened, much diminished state--provides, or has the possibility of providing (it provides me, let's say that) a great deal of seemingly boundless joy--bundled of course with pain, frustration, anger, etc. Like life itself.
I actually missed the The Princess Bride reference! I have watched the movie, and I like it, but it was quite a while ago now.
I realize, reading what you say, that I already knew that life is a vast smorgasbord of emotions. I didn't realize until now that I was quite focused on the negatives of life for at least a month now. I think what made me understand was my reaction to @roche's comment ("but that's all effort, which seems impossible; I just want to live without doing anything"). Which is something I've experienced before, but it really crept up on me this time. I can concede my brain just isn't in the right state of mind to make any solid decisions on the kid thing.
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