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Wellness Wednesday for April 3, 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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early in the morning or late at night, when you're not so hung up with logical worries like that

I don't know what you mean here — I've not noticed any such pattern.

Also, if you put it online in the right places

Such as?

even if it's weird crazy people who give you crazy negative feedback.

But if everyone who reads it hates it, then what good was writing it? Would my time have not been better spent doing something else?

My feeling is that those are all the sort of analytical, logical questions that get in the way of fiction writing, which is why I recommend doing it early or late. Or at least, when you're feeling more free and creative. But I don't know man, do whatever works for you.

which is why I recommend doing it early or late.

Again, why would time of day affect "the sort of analytical, logical questions that get in the way" or how "free and creative" I'm feeling?

You dont notice your mood and thinking change over the course of the day? Youre able to switch instantly from something like writing code to writing fiction? If you can, great, its just not easy for most people.

You dont notice your mood and thinking change over the course of the day?

Not really. At least, not with regards to this sort of worrying — what other people tend to call "catastrophizing" and I call 'the identification of how things can fail as a necessary precondition to take the necessary measures to prevent such bad outcomes' and 'not going blithely through life with a naïve optimism that everything will just somehow work out for the best for me with no real effort on my part.'

Youre able to switch instantly from something like writing code to writing fiction?

No, because, despite ~30 years of effort, I still can't really code.