site banner
PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2383 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for April 3, 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).

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Is it too late to save your marriage? Do you even want to?

Barring some highly unlikely miracle scenarios involving lightning strikes, brain tumors or religious conversion, I think so. And yes, yes I would. I would and have given damn near anything to make it work. We don't control other people. We can only control what we do in response.

This is correct, I think. I've never been a soldier, i've never had a personal near death experience, but in my lifetime I have lost a son to a childhood disease and a wife to cancer. I've been closer to elite power than I ever thought I would, and then I abandoned that as it was making me a worse person. I uprooted my life and moved to a different continent.

The person I am today is a product of all my experiences, good, bad or awful. A product of how I reacted to those experiences.

I hope things get better for you. Probably they will, but that doesn't stop them being painful in the now. If life is pain, then pain is life. The fact these things hurt shows you are alive, that you can move past the pain and emerge out the other side. Maybe not better, but perhaps at least wiser.

Good luck!

I feel you dawg. The girl I was seeing, well, we didn't end up marrying each other, but it was something we both looked forward to one day. I can only imagine how painful it would be when you already have a life together.

I suppose that while I can't help with the others, if you want you or a near and dear one to get a brain tumor, I can give decent advice.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats