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.
Notes -
Okay so, reevaluating your premise again: it is not impossible that a single exposure to a social event can change a young person’s interests and then trajectory. A young person might go see a baseball game and that sparks a lifelong interest in baseball. Or they might have seen a cool juggler, then gone on to juggle as a hobby. Or maybe they saw V for Vendetta and became infatuated with the idea of anonymous figures and rebellions, and then decided to form a hacking collective…
Fight Club presents an attractive image of young men forming an identity around primitive masculine fighting and tribalism. It’s also a great movie. So this can absolutely affect a young person’s life, who has just been exposed to a persuasive argument for masculine bonding and detesting female-coded safe spaces. Young people are also hardwired to imitate cooler older guys, and the movie stars prime Brad Pitt.
Now I would argue every young man should watch fight club, but that’s a separate point.
edit actually for an even better example, fight club influenced early early 4chan, instituting the norms of anonymity and secrecy, the anti-mainstream ethos, the “operations”, and some early memes. So that’s a good example of how one movie can influence something larger. But also, your post could easily have been read as “coloquial exaggeration”. Like someone posting, “did I ruin my life by choosing a culinary institute over Harvard?” Obviously not, but the person is really asking whether they’ve done goofed sufficiently to feel bad about their decision and readjust their future decision-making.
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