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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   939 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for January 1, 2025

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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Thank you: this was a beautiful post, I feel it has helped me a fair bit.

Materially, you are better off than the vast majority of people who have ever lived. Maybe the next generation will do worse, maybe not, but unless something really apocalyptic happens, they will still be materially well off by historical standards.

You're absolutely right, and I should make efforts to be more grateful for this. I'll confess I have some anxieties around being forced into poverty from being brought up by parents who grew up "third world poor" without adequate nutrition or modern healthcare and who passed down very similar anxieties. Rationally I do agree that outside of the really apocalyptic timelines I cannot control neither I nor my family are ever going to experience that sort of real material deprivation.

Even if you have to retrain into a more working class job, that's not the end of the world, or even your world.

This is true as well. I think it's easy to get caught up as thinking of your job title as your identity in modern society: internally I can't deny that a lot of my identity is centered around being a "tech guy", which is probably something I should work on. It does seem likely to me that either "I'm not competitive in the blue-collar labour market" or "my current capital is insufficient to support my family" are possible outcomes, but if I'm no longer fit to unclog a toilet likely society will be wildly productive enough to keep my children fed and housed at least.

Yesterday, I visited Saint Anthony's Monastery in Florence, Arizona

I looked up some pictures, and it really does look sublime. I'd like to visit some day as well, life permitting.

find other interesting and potentially beautiful things to do, even with a rather dull and low status day job

I think I would be happy if my children could find something they wanted to do, even if that does end up being joining a cult or a monastery. My father considered his job complete if I survived to eighteen having been fed three meals a day and without a criminal record, perhaps I need to take some lessons from him.

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