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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   2559 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for February 28, 2024

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 said they make them better and more enjoyable. He said he wanted to start drinking again to have more enjoyable interactions. I think it is a good idea. No one said anything about need. I was just pointing out what billions of people know already. Alcohol makes a lot of stuff more fun. Apparently that is a trigger in online rationalist adjacent spaces.

I mean I disagree with the idea that alcohol makes things more fun, as I said in another comment. But even if I did think that was true, I think that while you might not need alcohol to enjoy life, it's still bad advice to tell someone "hey if you aren't enjoying life you should drink". Because in that case, the person you are talking to would wind up needing alcohol to enjoy life and that's a terrible thing.

"Needing" a couple beers to enjoy hanging out with your buddies at a bar is not, in fact, a terrible thing. This is particularly true for definitions of "need" that aren't fully compulsive.

Well I think it is a bad thing. Since neither of us is really speaking about facts here, but about our opinions, I guess we're going to have to agree to disagree.

He was proposing drinking in a social situation once a week. Hardly the path to addiction and death. Billions of people drink, it is because it makes them feel good and makes things more fun.

I disagree. I think that the path to addiction starts precisely in small places. Nobody starts by drinking several bottles of liquor a day. It starts when you treat alcohol as something you need to get by in this small way. Then once you normalize that, you start using it more often, or in other situations, and it snowballs from there. As such, when someone is asking for advice I think "you should drink" is always bad advice.

If you've accidentally consumed wood alcohol (methanol) you should consume hard liquor (ethanol) immediately or you could die. So sometimes it is great advice. Other times it is merely good advice. haha :)

Astutely noticing the social benefits of a few beers and using that as a way to have a healthy dose of social interaction once a week is should not make a reasonable person think, "This could be a slippery slope into becoming a crackhead! Terrible plan!". It just doesn't track.

This is starting to feel vaguely culture warish puritanical.

What about if there were no bad side effects or health risks? Are you just against altering your mental state on religious grounds or some such?

If there were no health risks I would concede it would not be bad advice. I still would think that it's better to learn to get along in life without drinking (it's seriously not hard), but at least if one isn't playing with fire then it it's not so bad. But unfortunately that isn't really the world we live in.

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