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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Doesn't it? It looks like you laid out an argument for why a materialist view will end up in this place.
Maybe it should.
No. The materialist world is where we live, but we humans are sentient. Meaning we don't live solely in the materialist world, we interface with it through our brains, which are full of delusion and fantasy. Delusion and fantasy are how we overcome the randomness of the universe.
This is all old existentialist philosophy, with roots in stoicism. Camus said that the whole point of life was the revolt against death. To live and experience is to deny death for one more day. Through our offspring (genetic, artistic, ideological, political) we live beyond our own lives, and deny death into the future. It is our task to live our lives as seems best to us, to enjoy what we can, overcome what we cannot, and fight it out to the last.
The last act is bloody, however brave be all the rest of the play. But our own personal experiences are tiny, insignificant things, important only to us. There's six billion people breeding and fighting, all trying to get to the next stage, the next generation, into the future.
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A materialist view can end up anywhere it pleases. We place comfort at the fore and abscond from reality? Our lives become mediocre and empty. You don't need fancy logic to create values here. Just look around.
No it can't. You can't simply summon up any arbitrary set of values out of the facts of reality.
You cannot create values. Values, to be values, must be real, must come from outside us.
I disagree. Value can only come from within.
My philosophy is that value is created by sacrifice.
Things, people, institutions, are only worth what people give up to get them.
To become a better man, a greater man, you must find more to sacrifice. This is why the ancients burned their children, the ultimate evolutionary sacrifice.
There is no objective value in the Universe. The universe does not care.
Only our subjective experience imputes value to the randomness of nature.
And our subjective experience grants value to those things we give the most to get. By definition. That which is easily attainable is not valuable. Value is scarcity. Suffering is cheap. Making it produce something positive is hard.
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You should read Nietzsche.
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