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).
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
From April 14th to April 20th, I quit using social media, forums, and any sort of online discussion space to see what would happen. The result is... nothing. Just a sense of under-stimulation which gave a nice opportunity to try out some hobbies. Ultimately when I have some energy, I'm gonna do chores or socialize or art, and social media is just for "dead time" when you run out of energy. It seems common sense that social media affects us a lot, but honestly I'm not so sure.
Modern communities aren’t really set up for adults to socialize with friend groups every night. I wish they were (I think this was part of the appeal of Friends and to some extent Cheers). If you’re spending time by yourself or with a partner then - assuming you don’t have the energy for exciting activities - you are indeed just going to be consooming entertainment much of the time. I don’t think that’s so bad, and I agree that TikTok isn’t necessarily much worse than just watching TV, although I allow for the possibility that it reduces attention spans in a dangerous way (as yet unproven).
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Dude, you went less than a week. That is not enough time to update on how much social media affects you. I know it's oversimplified, but remember the saying - it takes 21 days to form a habit. Point is, id give any lifestyle change a month before speculating on how it affects you.
I'm certain more time wouldn't change things for me. Maybe you're different.
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As a (presumably) functional adult, I'm not surprised. I have a job and kids, and am also like that. I use social media in exactly the same way my family used to use magazines, and I suppose if it disappeared, I'd go back to that. When I was a teen I would go sit at a library for a couple of hours at a time reading magazines -- at least message boards are interactive.
It's plausible it's a lot different for people with addictive personalities (I have never been even a little tempted to gamble more than a few dollars, get extremely drunk, smoke, or do drugs), young teens, and people with a lot of time on their hands and no particularly useful or interesting activity easily at hand.
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I somewhat agree and disagree. I think 'dead' time can be repurposed over time, if not to enhance productivity but instead to do something marginally more constructive, such as reading a book or picking up a room a little bit. Assuming you don't replace it with TV/vidya/low hanging fruit.
I think 6 days is too short of a time to have any significant effects or adjustment. A month or more might be a better sample.
The overall feeling was, social media is equivalent to TV. Back in the 90s, fuss was made over the shocking statistic that Americans spend 6-8 hours per night watching TV, with the tone of "Clearly this is horrible and will have drastic consequences on us". 30 years later, Gen Y are doing completely fine. With this stuff, it's not about a deleterious effect psychologically so much as the opportunity cost of what you could be doing instead. I don't imagine most humans have ever spent "dead time" AKA energy-depleted time in a productive way. Rather, they'll just opt for the easiest road to stimulation which is casual socializing. Is it good that humans had to socialize in the past to stay entertained? Most likely, yeah.
Our society was built on a web of super laid-back socializing, because everyone was naturally bored as hell without other people. The anxiety problem among zoomers is probably a direct result of this laid-back environment going away. Because a lot of us only start socializing once we're needy, once we have a void to be filled like loneliness or whatever. If we grow up casually shooting the shit, it really makes a big difference to social adjustment.
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