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Wellness Wednesday for June 12, 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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Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Couple of minor responses:

social media has a lot of upsides and there could always be a counter cultural push back against the all encompassing sides of it.

Inequality growing is a contested issue and I don't know how strongly to feel about it. I live in a low CoL city in Canada and I have lots of friends with highschool or less who own homes and have families. I think the extremes make it to our attentions. That said, housing prices are controversially a big problem right now but it can be solved, and there's lots of mainstream attention pushing that direction.

AI may not devalue certain kinds of labour in the short/medium term. And there's always a chance of it ushering in so much productivity that material needs are much more abundant and cheap. It's cheaper and easier than ever to purchase low-risk index funds and at least get a piece of the productivity pie.

Online dating sucks but again, you only really hear the horror stories. I used it for the first time after a divorce and met a long term partner within 2 weeks. I did not optimize for the system, I was 100% honest and straightforward in my profile and got a minor number of matches but they seemed to be higher quality for me.

Politicians have always done this. It's easier to find out what's going on and discuss it meaningfully than it used to be. I'm cynical about this one though so I say focus on local politics and things you can actually affect.