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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
If an American is afraid that the USA (or really anywhere) is becoming a low-trust society, and want to immigrate somewhere that will maintain/be a high trust society in the future (for future kids etc), where should they go?
Assume they have a bachelors degree, enough money to live in most places for a few years without income, and willing to learn languages/assimilate into local culture. Ideally there is a path to naturalization and that it doesn't take >10 years (i.e. rules out UAE), and ideally path to citizenship is reliable (probably rules out Singapore as hearing it's hard to acquire citizenship there now).
Where would you suggest?
Just move out of California, there are plenty of other places in the us where the law is enforced and you don’t have to deal with all of the stupid low trust bullshit. I’m saying this as someone who left the Bay Area around a year before the pandemic and has since lived in various places in Colorado and now Summerlin Las Vegas.
More options
Context Copy link
Denmark was the first one I thought of, and to a lesser extent Norway and Finland (Sweden has too much immigration imo)
But yes between language, the normal stand-off-ness from Scandinavians, it does seem like you gotta have an "in" to make friends/have a community
The language should be really rather easy to learn because it only split off maybe 1200 years ago.
Except that Scandinavians, like other Northern Europeans, have a reputation for refusing to speak their native tongues with English speakers because they speak perfectly good English.
Easy solution: pretend you're Swiss and only speak their mongrel German?
Will anyone believe there’s a Swiss person who doesn’t speak English?
You could pretend to be québécois or French and have a chip on your shoulder about English, I guess.
Quebecois definitely would cover a multitude of sins of you happen to speak horrible gutter Frenglish...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'd move to a small to mid-size, Midwest town that is doing tolerably well, but isn't that appealing to outsiders. I visited Decorah, Iowa recently and it would be a good example of the kind of place I'm thinking.
More options
Context Copy link
Why not join a religious community? If what you want is high trust, you’re not going to find more trust than that.
Interesting angle!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It’s very very difficult to assimilate into a tight knit society as an adult without marrying a local and putting in a tremendous effort with language and local culture. The novelty of immersing into a new language and culture wears off very fast and after a while it turns into a slump. Even if you succeed somewhat, you need to live with the fact that 1) some things will never feel quite right 2) your children will be very different people than you.
More options
Context Copy link
Move to America -- there are plenty of areas that aren't afflicted with either of urbanites or crystal meth, just pick one, move there, and get to know your neighbours.
This.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How do you describe banning and confiscating guns from civilians over a weekend or over a couple week period embarking on a zero-covid strategy which required strict lockdowns for the majority of multiple years applying to most of the population as "without major swings in policy"? Or sending government thugs to harass and threaten anyone speaking against the policy? Or sending government thugs to harass and threaten any person who didn't want the covid injection? Or any number of other totalitarian/authoritarian measures NZ took over hysteria of the last few years?
If what New Zealand did during the covid hysteria can be accurately described as not a quick, major swing in policy, I honestly shudder to think of what more awaits the people there. Even if one were to accept a government which accepts next to zero deviation from strict, overnight concocted mandates could still be described as "high trust," high-trust societies and distrust in government are not mutually exclusive. And in those cases, a fair amount more distrust in government dictate and authoritarianism would go a long way.
In the late 00s and early 10s, I was considering taking NZ up on their "tech" grant/visa program by moving my small company (since sold) there and thank God I decided against it. In any case, the dogooder authoritarian hysteria which has overtaken New Zealand which could be seen in firearm bans and confiscation, tobacco use bans and comically high taxation, and the covid lockdowns/covid injection lunacy should be a big red flag to any person thinking about moving there. The same is true if to a slightly lesser extent for the behavior of Canadians and Canadian government as well.
The last few years have really been an eye-opening experience for any person looking for a new country to live.
What does that have to do with the claim about not having major policy changes? NZ has had multiple, quick major policy changes in the last few years which had a huge effect on people there.
And while many countries had big policy responses, very few were in the same ballpark of authoritarian as measures NZ took.
Countries were not flying blind. There was plenty of evidence lockdowns and other authoritarian measures were extremely costly and not effective for respiratory viruses. They ignored relevant evidence and guidelines crafted over generations in order to embark on extremely costly, authoritarian experiments which had never shown to be effective at the alleged goal let alone good policy given their extreme costs. Policymakers claimed they were based on comically bad models early in 2020. Previous tools (early treatment, etc.) which were far cheaper were not only discouraged but banned in places like New Zealand and Canada.
No amount of attempting to rewrite history will change reality. Countries around the world discarded experience earned in death for a thousand years to embark on experimental and horrendously authoritarian NPIs with little or no support to justify them beyond "scary new virus! panic!" And the critics of this leap into the unknown have proved to be correct.
Did you bother to read this before linking it? First off, "Respondents were self-selecting participants, recruited via Facebook and Instagram. A total of n=629 sample was achieved of adults in New Zealand." Secondly, an example which characterizes the sorts of questions asked is "How strongly do you support or oppose the decision to move NZ to alert level four?" Do you know what "alert level 4" means without looking it up? How many respondents do you think had a clue? This methodology is garbage and bad evidence of public opinion.
Frankly, it's very tiring how so many people use polling spams they likely didn't even read let alone analyze which they found with a basic google search to prove some comment about public opinion
Polling is notoriously nonsense and it's revealed to be nonsense every time they're expected to predict objective outcomes. If you cannot predict "X will win political race," why in the world would anyone expect you to "measure" vague opinions which are so easily manipulated with different word choices or adding in the cost of policies being asked about, i.e., the difference between "would you support welfare program y?" vs "would you support welfare program y if it mean raising taxes by 10%?" With the thing you linked being a good example of "polling" used to manipulate public opinion, not measure it.
a max security prison is a "relatively" libertarian situation compared to super max or solitary confinement, but then again so what and what an odd way to characterize this
government wasn't always "the largest and most important institution they interact with"
More options
Context Copy link
The key bit here is "interact with." It's possible for a high-trust community to dislike or distrust some distant authority figures who rarely meddle in their affairs, but if it's the actual day-to-day representatives of government within the community who aren't trusted, then your community is by definition low-trust. What has happened in America over the past several generations is that what were once two separate domains of "trusted figures of local government" and "suspicious characters far away in Washington who need to be watched" have become merged in practice and in people's minds into a single thing called "the government" and rather than spreading trust upwards to the federal level it has spread distrust downwards to the local level.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The deranged response to Covid would unnerve me too much. Perhaps a bit less trust in the government is actually to my liking.
More options
Context Copy link
Well, part of what keeps a high-trust society the way it is is distrust of outsiders, so you may be starting off on the wrong foot here. I would suggest first taking a look at your own roots or those of your significant other if you have one. Are you from an immigrant family or do you have relatives in or recent ancestors from a small town or rural area? Those are places where you already have a connection, where the locals are less likely to immediately reject you because your being there makes some sense in their eyes, and where you yourself may be less likely to bail out early. There are plenty of places still left in America where you can tune out the culture war just by turning off your computer or phone, and if you choose to get involved in things like town meetings and local government you can do your own part to build the kind of community you want to live in.
If that isn't an option or if you insist that you still want the lifestyle of a first world urbanite without the downsides of violent crime or social dysfunction, then the places I would suggest are Taiwan (more accepting of foreigners than Japan with a similar standard of living, but may only be a short-term solution for geopolitical reasons) or New Zealand (politics there might offend you if you are hardcore anti-woke, but it's probably the safest place to be during the apocalypse), in addition to Singapore which you mentioned.
More options
Context Copy link
I imagine it's pretty hard for a society to be all three of high trust, wealthy/developed, and open to immigration/naturalization. If you're high trust and wealthy (e.g. Japan, Singapore), you need to have a somewhat strict stance toward immigration, or at least naturalization, to prevent economic migrants from breaking that high-trust equilibrium. Conversely, if you're wealthy and liberal about immigration (e.g. US, Canada), it's unlikely you'll manage to build a high-trust society. And finally, If you're open to immigration and manage to remain high trust, that's probably a sign that nobody wants to immigrate (I can't think of any obvious examples here but plausibly some poor but peaceful country could fit the bill).
I think your best bets would be one of (1) compromising on citizenship for yourself by picking one of the high-trust + developed but xenophobic countries and securing citizenship for your kids via jus sanguinis if you don't have a partner yet, or (2) finding a smaller-scale, high-trust community within one of the wealthy + immigratorily liberal countries.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link