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.
No email address required.
Notes -
To build on what other people wrote, how you value the judgement should have a correlation to how you value the person doing the judging. Don't worry so much about random people on the Internet. Especially don't pay attention to people who actively dislike you for other reasons than the particular action in question, or who have an ideology that they want to convert you to, or who seem to have bad judgement about you or in general. But pay more attention to people you respect, including mentors, your idealized/future self, or any relevant demigods or bodhisattvas. "Don't make baby Jesus cry." Maybe a question to ask is, "who does this person think I should become?"
The catch is that this works for narcissists and solipsists, too, because they don't value anyone except themselves. So you need to have empathy and humility and openness to the possibility that you might be wrong. But there are entire ecosystems out there built on exploiting this. Walking down the street today, I encountered panhandlers, crazies, and contractors soliciting for charities of questionable effectiveness. The world is full of people who don't give a shit what your personal experience is on the inside, as long as you act the way they want on the outside.
To use astrophysics as a metaphor, the stable Trojan points all seem to involve some form of religion, but it's possible to hang out at unstable Trojan points if you're up for making periodic orbital adjustments.
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