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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2383 thread views

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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Any idea what might have been going on?

You reached the threshold to enter a positive feedback loop. You explained this yourself:

And things are starting to compound. The fact that I can get dates with desirable women is doing wonders for my confidence and self-esteem, which makes me more willing to put myself out there in other ways, which I expect will make me more attractive which will lead to more dating success, and so on.

The moment of lucidity comes down to pure luck, e.g. your gut microbiome temporarily aligning in just the right way. You were probably close to this threshold for a long time and never realized it, but that's super common. A lot of people in dire straits are a hair's breadth away from some positive feedback loop that would fix their lives, but they don't know how to pass the threshold. That's not to blame them; you need a period of initial success to enter the loop, which can be extremely hard to come across.

The idea that the little bugs living in my stomach may have literally just randomly taken the day off from bothering me, just like it felt is funny to me. And the idea that I'm probably never actually that far from a breakthrough even when it doesnt feel like it does give me a lot of optimism, thanks

You reached the threshold to enter a positive feedback loop.

I think the situation is the exact polar opposite actually. /u/Thoroughlygruntled briefly experienced an ideal that a lot of self-help books promise but that doesn't actually exist. The overwhelming majority of people alive are clearly not living this kind of life. And I know it's not for lack of trying because I've wasted more than a decade of my own life in the same kinds of attempts.
Unfortunately, human beings are not really built for long-term satisfaction or contentment or whatever you wanna call it. This is an issue based on genes and hormones and it probably has to be fixed physiologically as well. If it is even fixable.

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