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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1949 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for September 24, 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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This forum has previously discussed how people who make excessive use of online personas often allow those personas to become Flanderized and even to bleed back into their real-life opinions. Still, when doxing/doxxing/SWATting/phonebooking/unmasking can lead to being fired by your employer or ostracized by your family members, some measure of detachment between one's personas seems advisable.

But at what point does it not matter any longer? When should a person abandon his online personas and walk proudly under his government name? After he retires, so that he need not worry about his job? After his parents die, so that he need not worry about his inheritance? Never? Or perhaps, after retirement, his government persona will become the secondary one, and his online persona the primary one.

As loathe as I am to generally recommend an anime, Serial Experiments Lain had me milling over this question a lot as well. My main objection to it is that the people who do this tend (not always, but there is a general pattern) to become the mask rather than taking the mask off, and usually in a self-destructive way.

Who is this person, really? How much of their being is dictated by their immediate environment?

That post reads to me like it's talking about people who feed off attention. If you don't care about maximizing attention then you mitigate the risk of Flanderizing yourself. My online persona is not so different from my real-life persona which is not so different from who I've always been. I don't have a Twitter account so that helps.

Only boring people have nothing to hide.

Being boring is not a sin.

And if they have nothing to hide, why would they accept complete electronic surveillance of their boring lives? Seems a little illegitimate.

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