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 often think about the SSC post on 'Bravery Debates'. It occurs to me that like Randian Objectivism and many other conceptions of virtue ethics, Stoicism could be a very useful lesson to the right person, and disastrous to the wrong person. Marcus Aurelius, despite his qualities, was also a very depressed and unpleasant man who berated himself for feeling sad over his son's death.
This ties in well with Aristotelian ethics - which holds that virtue is always a mean between two vicious extremes. Even qualities we think of as 'pure good' are limited and should not be pursued in excess. Excessive temperance leads to a pleasureless life and a scornful and judgmental attitude. An excessive zeal for justice is also dangerous, as is excessive courage and even excessive 'wisdom'.
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