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).
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Notes -
I can do small talk and sometimes even get a bit of enjoyment from it. The problem IRL is that many people's beliefs are so intertwined with their politics. If I talk about something completely unrelated to politics they might bring up progressive stack concepts as a way to discount a source.
I do talk about things they are interested in too, but they aren't interested my truth-seeking style of discussing the topic. I like to pull in a lot of data, consider all sides of an argument, and explore the topic in novel ways. Most IRL people seem to just want the social confirmation/validation of their deep thoughts instead of wanting to think in a scientist/rationalist adjacent style.
The thing is I've found online spaces where I can talk about deep things in a way all participants enjoy. We use our real names and do video conferencing. So some of this is specifically me being frustrated by IRL people because they are so different than my far away friends that I talk to virtually.
Sometimes I'll watch a podcast where 2 people get deep dialogue on a subject. I'd like to be participating in conversations like those without being on a podcast.
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