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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2301 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for December 13, 2023

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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But that’s not true—you can do everything right and be perfectly healthy and suddenly die anyway, as the statistics tell us.

Well, the first thing that gets me by is that I actually find the statistics pretty comforting. For my age group, only about 2 people per 1000 die on an annual basis. If I avoid the really dumb stuff, like suicide and getting killed in an interpersonal spat, this gets even better. If I avoid being morbidly obese or severe drug addict, another point in my favor. I'll die someday, of course, but the odds are strongly in favor of it not being something I need to fuss about all that much at the moment. Some of that is denial! But the denial is aided by the statistics rather than the other way around. This is a level of randomness I can tolerate.

I suspect that my toleration of this when I get older will be built on cope about having lived a good life.

Yeah, I could tolerate it too, but can no longer deny now that it’s happened to someone I love

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