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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That's wild. I knew the youth (and increasingly young adults) had been brain poisoned, but I never connected it to some unfounded faith in "randomness". My parents, teachers, scout masters, basically every adult in my life in the 90's and early 00's rode my ass that "If I don't X, Y won't happen" or inversely "If you don't X, terrible Z will happen". At time it felt overly deterministic, and the example my mother always used must have been a warning passed down through the generations. "If you don't get good grades you'll grow up to be a ditch digger!" It was an anachronism in the 90's, I can scarcely imagine how it sounds now.
While I rebelled at the time as a kid, never the less I grew up and stuck to the golden path as an adult. Funny how those things happen. Life is pretty good on the path, prudently considering action and consequence, delaying gratification. A story comes up with my wife constantly where I was in this gifted program as a kid, and they had these work-study units you could do. It was a bit free form, with different levels you could advance through. But I had lost interest in about a dozen of them halfway through, and the teachers told me I couldn't start any new units until I finished the ones I had already began. I didn't want to, so I told my mom I wanted to drop out of the gifted program. She read me the riot act about finishing things I've started. So off I went, knocking out all the units I'd begun, and turns out by the end of the year I'd finished more than anyone else and got some meaningless attaboy for it.
My wife on the other hand, her parents always told her if something was hard just give up.
To this day, a difference between my wife and I is that I finish things and she doesn't. She has a stack of a dozen books she's started next to her bed, I refuse to start one book until I've finished the one I'm on. She has a half dozen hobby projects in various states of completion, I've been laboring away on a set of chairs, refusing to begin some floating bookshelves she wants until they are finished. She started refinishing the kitchen... I had to finish it so we had usable kitchen.
Sometimes I do feel like a person out of sync with my generation. You do read about a transitional or micro generation between Gen X and Millennials.
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