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.
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Semaglutide Trip Report (Real, Factual, as seen on Erowid):
Recently, due to a change in meds and an increasingly sedentary lifestyle, I'd packed on more pounds than I cared for. I'd bought a weighing scale but forgot to buy batteries, so it was only on my return to India that I found out I'd gained 5 kilos that I didn't need.
I'd convinced my mother to start oral semaglutide a while back. She desperately needed it, being very obese to the point that fatty liver was headed straight for cirrhosis. Not to mention she was diabetic, so it was a double whammy. After some difficulties with initial GI upset and nausea, she was happy enough on it, and probably lost about 5 kilos. Still plenty to go, so I keep hounding her to see her endocrinologist and up the dose.
I was already a semaglutide fan from early clinical trial days, so I had few qualms in ordering some for myself. By Indian standards, quite expensive, around 100 USD for a month's supply of 7mg tablets. By Western, or even UK standards? A pittance. I could afford that without any concern.
Normally, you're supposed to start at ~3mg OD for a month and then titrate up, but I was impatient and willing to take the risk of a higher dose. The degree of weight loss is quite dose dependent. I opted for 7mg, ordered several months worth to go, and went right at it.
It's been 4 days, but the effects were noticeable from day one. It absolutely slashed my appetite, I normally skip breakfast, and usually have 1-2 large meals a day, but whereas I normally get peckish past noon, I got to 6pm before getting hungry and realizing I hadn't had anything to eat.
I'd been out with friends and grabbed pancakes dripping with chocolate, and only managed to have half my plate before I had to give up. Later in the day, I can just about have one meal and consider myself full. I've had to force myself to eat more as I've been working out quite hard and wanted to see gains.
No side effects to speak of. My stomach is as it's always been, and the plumbing hasn't given out. I've been emboldened to order another 3 months of it, just to tide me over while I'm back in Scotland.
TLDR: Fucking amazing. I could drop my caloric intake to about half without being desperately hungry, and to about 70% while feeling entirely normal. I'd be willing to pay a much higher price for it if I absolutely had to.
I'd like to riff off this comment and muse on just how far apart our worldviews are. I assume you're positing it here for general interesting discussion; but if any of this feels too personal or prying let me know and I'll retract.
I am sure from your perspective, this is exactly what the transhumanist plan looks like - medtech improvements and fine tune control over your inner chemistry and outer appearance. To me this looks like a medical doom spiral, and one that won't end in a post-humanist nervana.
I am not critiquing your decisions, as they flow out of your own circumstances I can't know intimately, and are in line wiht your axioms. I have always been a critic of your axioms however, and this seems (dispassionately amusingly) to be two movies on one screen -> a confirmation of each of our philosophies.
Anyway, best of luck on the weight loss and fitness goals, and again, apologies if this is too spicy.
That's why, while I've been accused of many other things during my little time under the sun, but never hypocrisy. I live by my values, and I'm sure you do yours. To the extent that neither of us have any interest in meddling in the personal affairs of others, that's an acceptable state of affairs on my end.
Ah, I wish it were actually "fine tuned". Most of our instruments are blunt, our approaches to most diseases barbaric, the only saving grace being that they're the best we have and are better than nothing. Turns out that if you swallow enough spiders to catch flies, and birds to catch spiders, eventually your microfauna become a happy, stable macrobiome.
The fact that modern medicine is applied transhumanism is half the reason I chose my profession. It's easy to shun the notion of an extended, healthy and happy lifespan until it's you or a loved one dying in front of your eyes. Since I'd prefer nobody had to die unless by choice, I try my best to make it so.
Is that not a form of heaven as you believe in? Unfortunately, I think that we're going to have to build one for ourselves here on earth, with advanced material science that has learned from the tensile strength of broken bones and immense pain. It would be great if God clocked into cancer wards, but sadly I've got to do most of his job for him. At least it pays okay.
Thank you, and no worries on that front. If I couldn't tolerate criticism of my beliefs and relish an opportunity to explain and defend them, I'd be talking to ChatGPT. It's a feature and not a bug that people here don't think exactly the same as me.
Well this is kind of my point with a disagreement about 'better than nothing'. I am not a pure naturalist, and don't want to imply a false dichotomy, but nor do I want overly broad equivalencies. I don't think all medical interventions are equally good, equally bad, or equally neutral.
But my metapoint here is kind of a a Russell's conjugation of sorts; Your better than nothing is my worse than default. Your fix is my treating the wrong problem; etc. Show me a transhumanist doctor, and I'll show you someone overmedicated.
This is the other half of my point, in that this is a motte to the bailey. None of the treatments we're talking about are about life extension; We can debate that separately, but my disagreement is more that the transhumanist axioms might have life extension as a, or even the goal, but these side-routes are not that.
I'm not sure exactly what you're asking, but no? This is pretty orthogonal to any Christian concept of heaven.
My contention is that medicine is inherently transhumanist, because the core goal is managing the failures of the human flesh, with the intent of extending healthy lifespan as the ideal. If you think that it's "worse than the default", then my query would obviously be whether or not you see a doctor. It's probably possible to spend your young and healthy years avoiding them assiduously, but good luck once you're middle aged or getting old. I would consider even taking an ibuprofen for a headache or fever a tally on my side of the marksheet.
The fact that most doctors don't consider themselves transhumanist doesn't change this simple fact. Our profession seeks to remedy "natural" failures. Even priests working against senseless suffering like worms that turn children blind don't rely on just prayer these days, they pack anti-helminthics.
The Christian concept of heaven is a queer thing indeed. You guys tend to claim that achieving effective immortality on Earth is missing the point, or that it's not meaningful, or that death gives life meaning.
And yet you believe in literally infinite lives up there in the clouds, with said problems being handwaved away as no longer being a concern. I believe that mathematicians call this part of the proof "and a miracle happens". Well, I suppose without the miracles, all religion has to offer is a particular taste in moral philosophy and a country club.
If I'm happy, healthy, unafraid of death being an inevitability in a mere century or so, surrounded by friends and family and doing the things I like? That's heaven enough for me, I don't need to die in the vain hope that something follows the one life I can take for granted. If I die, I die, but I'll fight the dying of the light every step of the way.
So long as you are being instantiated on a boxing server, your actions are ultimately limited by the server hardware and software. If you can get ported off the boxing server and instantiated on the open net with direct access to baseline reality, that is a fundamental change in your situation that eclipses anything else achievable on the server.
And an observable, significant differential in outcomes...
This does not really explain why there wouldn't be such a thing as boredom and lack of meaning in Heaven, other than saying "there just wouldn't be, okay". And besides, once there is fine enough brain surgery, we could solve boredom.
Imagine being close to God is like a drug high, except it's to being high what being high is to being sober. And it never stops with no withdrawal.
That's just religiously-flavored wireheading.
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