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 -
I think response 2 is directionally correct, but it can be combined with other approaches for a more beneficial outcome. You can only focus on a very small amount of the world's data your lifetime. You have to focus on things that are relevant to you. For instance, if you thought about every food (down to the specific plant/animal) in the world before deciding what to eat then you would starve to death because it is too much data to process. With suffering it is just not relevant to focus on most of it, and doing so will drain you of precious resources that you need to address the much more localized suffering.
It is axiomatic that an individual human can only impact a very limited amount of suffering. Once that boundary is chosen it becomes much more manageable. You can do local things that will have an impact on alleviating suffering for others and for future generations (e.g. helping preserve a piece of public land). Also, don't intentionally do things that will cause suffering for others. There is only so much you can do, and the rest of the suffering is out of your control.
You can also expand on response 1. There are techniques that allow you to think about suffering without being as bothered by it. Those include meditation, therapy techniques, Stoicism, psychedelics, and teachings that help you focus on appreciating the present moment (e.g. Letting Go by David Hawkins, or The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle).
Finally, the suffering might serve some purpose that you don't know. Maybe it is needed to teach new people a lesson that they would not be able to learn if the suffering was eliminated. Maybe the suffering is needed to motivate humans to take actions that will lead to a better future world. Maybe suffering is needed so that non-suffering can be properly appreciated.
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