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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This would absolutely depend on the person. In a hypothetical where I could donate to my wife, I would do so unequivocally and mostly disregard relevant risks. The tradeoff is so clear and simple that it would be as easy of a choice as I could ever make. If I had children, I would say the same and it would probably be even more clear and obvious. A parent? Well, I guess I'd want to look at the life expectancy, but with our current ages (me late 30s, them about 60), I would lean towards a yes. Close friend? Probably. Distant friend? Maybe, I would surely consider it. Random person that I've never met? Nope, definitely not, I'm not interested in trading off any of my life expectancy and a significant medical procedure for someone that I don't know.
This is a good example of ways in which I am not a utilitarian.
Yes, the poster that prompted my thought had a much more "extreme" tuning curve which is why I thought they weren't considering potential medical advances in their calculus.
I also often think to myself how close would a friend need to be for me to be cool with a donation of this sort. And I am not sure myself. I would probably consider it for anyone I was already interacting strongly prior to their diagnosis. But that's because I know the disease, making me more sympathetic than I otherwise would have been.
It's actually a pretty good way of thinking about how close you really are to someone. If you're genuinely willing to give them your kidney, you're either quite altruistic or they really mean something to you. I can think of a half dozen people that I'd put just about the in same category as wife and kids above - "yes, without question, that's worth it to me, and if I lose ten years off my life, I can die happily with that choice". After that collection of deeply loved friends, I don't think I'd know until I was in that position. I'd need to do a lot more homework.
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