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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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I have a similar - perhaps reversed - experience as this. I chalk it up to my upbringing, being consistently taught and reinforced that stereotyping someone is only one notch above imposing something like literal chattel slavery on them. As such, as Arthur Chu might say, I was trained to periodically "mind-kill" myself to never predict the behavior of someone based on other signals without some specific independent evidence. If I ran into a burly man with face tattoos in a dark alley in an area known for gang activity, it would be evil to treat him any differently than if I ran into an old lady in her 70s who has to take deep breaths every few steps; the burly man could just be a tattoo and fitness enthusiast, and the old lady could be an armed robber with a hidden gun. The relative odds of these scenarios don't matter; in fact, even considering calculating it is, again, evil.
I've been trying to learn to think differently, since I noticed that even the people who push this stuff clearly don't believe it, as shown by their revealed preference and, more recently, just explicit praise of the moral virtuousness of stereotyping in [circumstances]. It's not easy to navigate out of decades of propaganda that started since grade school, though.
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