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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Notes -
The sense in which life is suffering calls us to be terribly careful, like trying to solve an almost impossible problem that you can’t help but accurately register your current progress at.
Craving for a lack of suffering is still a craving -- not to mention impossible to provide. The (physical) suffering only increases as you age. I say again, you might as well become accustomed to it as soon as you can.
This seems like a fairly distorted rationalisation for circumcision. I experienced quite a huge amount of pain myself, both in infancy and in adolescence (neither of the instances I'm referring to were circumcision-based either, since I haven't ever had it done to me), yet I would not in any way condone a situation where suffering is purposefully inflicted on an infant. Especially by the very people tasked with caring for it. That is effectively what circumcision is, regardless of the true intent of the individuals involved.
The idea here isn't "It is feasible to eliminate every source of suffering from a person's life". Even if you hold the belief that some amount of suffering is inevitable in any human life, that's not incompatible whatsoever with "You should not be intentionally adding to that by inflicting suffering on someone against their will". Any line of reasoning that states that suffering is inevitable, thus it is trivial and of no consequence whenever it is inflicted, can literally be used to justify not only circumcision but also torture and all manner of atrocities.
"So what, I pulled off your fingernails? That's trivial compared to the pain experienced by other people!" Technically true, but it makes it no less morally reprehensible. And disregarding the physical and mental toll it can take simply because of the existence of other potentially unpreventable sources of suffering is incoherent. If someone had to endure one painful, traumatic event as opposed to two, I think anybody would prefer the former.
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