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.
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These days I just laugh dismissively when they start it and talk about something else. Ideally you try to act like they embarrassed themselves and you're helping them cover for it.
Super-ideally your other friends do the same thing, because that type is easily cowed into conformity. The first time I had this happen at a get-together it was the most wonderful feeling in the world, made me appreciate why leftists get addicted to it.
Basically, I got over the nerd instinct to debate and the conservative instinct to be nice, and it made things so much better.
It works great, just short circuits their entire script; they don't actually believe anything, they're just parroting slogans for social approval, so withholding that approval shuts them down.
The occasional one who tries to push the issue gets a "yeah, no" and a little mental note next to their name.
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