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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2280 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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I have some bad news for you, son.

The world is cold and random. But it doesn’t have to be unfeeling. It remains possible to leave a thinking, feeling legacy that propagates your values—and values your memory—into the future.

It’s theoretically possible for an elite to outlive his body via song the history books, but for most people, I wouldn’t count on it. I’d say achieving notoriety in your field is more plausible. But the easiest way, the one that was traditional before any of this dogma of life after death, is children.

Good luck!

In my unfortunate new experience, what you say is good for coming to terms with mortality.

But acute grief is more about the imagined future you’ve lost, and the sense of unfairness and senselessness

I have a child. And am a child of the departed. It’s certainly some consolation.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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