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).
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I've noticed this too, but then I took a step back and recognized a larger pattern. This is something like the stages of grief. I think rationality causes people to go through many stages/emotions and unhappiness is just one they can temporarily land on.
If you look at other examples of people radically changing their belief system later in life you will often observe that they go through a cycle of emotional states.
Do these emotional states just appear from nothing? I'd argue that they become happier because they find some other belief system above and beyond rationality that helps them integrate their psyche.
Rationality alone is cold comfort.
In the acceptance stage (the last stage) of grief:
I don't know why it is human nature that most people have to go through all the other stages before they can come to acceptance. I just observe that it happens. When something unfair/unjust happens in the world many people will become angry initially. Many eventually come around to acceptance over time. Just because things are unfair the rational action isn't to waste your energy being upset/angry forever.
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