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PaperclipPerfector  16hr ago (text post)   489 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for January 21, 2026

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 is fun. My only tension was:

Statements 24 and 3: How much must I protect the environment? 61% of the people who have completed this activity have this tension in their beliefs. You agreed that: The environment should not be damaged unnecessarily in the pursuit of human ends. But disagreed that: People should not journey by car if they can walk, cycle or take a train instead. As walking, cycling and taking the train are all less environmentally damaging than driving a car for the same journey, if you choose to drive when you could have used another mode of transport, you are guilty of unnecessarily damaging the environment. The problem here is the word 'unnecessary'. Very few things are necessary, if by necessary it is meant essential to survival. But you might want to argue that much of your use of cars or aeroplanes is necessary, not for survival, but for a certain quality of life. The difficulty is that the consequence of this response is that it then becomes hard to be critical of others, for it seems that 'necessary' simply means what one judges to be important for oneself. A single plane journey may add more pollutants to the atmosphere than a year's use of a high-emission vehicle. Who is guilty of causing unnecessary environmental harm here?

My disagreement is that just because you can walk, cycle, or use transit, that doesn't mean that your ends are fully met in doing so. "I want to get there faster" or "I want to get there in peace and quiet" are legitimate desires which are generally worth the harm. I read "necessary" as meaning "necessary to the end sought", not "necessary to survival" (which would be a very silly position unless you're properly Tedpilled). They address this in their explanation, but fail to convince me.

I'm a simple creature. I think that the the conversion of Mercury into a Dyson swarm counts necessary damage to the environment. No issues there.

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