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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2189 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for September 3, 2025

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).

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I have a good relationship with my parents, but I wouldn't say I particularly care about living up to their values. Maybe it's because their values were generic suburban apolitical secular centrism. They had no clear values to live up to. I had a good childhood and they've been generous now I'm an adult, but growing up there wasn't really a strong culture for us to preserve.

I think I do want to give my kids the same kind of childhood I had, so if that counts then I definitely want to preserve that. But I'd say it's more that I had a good childhood (quite a lot of freedom, being outside a lot, no digital panopticon yet) and I think that would make my kids happy.

I definitely want to have lots of children, which I know will make them happy.

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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."

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