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Wellness Wednesday for February 8, 2023

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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Hoping to start a book club to help people learn more about philosophy/improve themselves etc.

Anyone know of good intro to philosophy books, specifically utilitarianism? Looking for something newer and accessible but that still gives an accurate overview of the philosophy.

I wasn't going to get into it since it's not utilitarianism*, but since that barrier is broken I guess I'll throw out another strong recommendation for Meditations. I just recently did a book club where we did one notebook each week and discussed our thoughts and reflections, and it was very edifying. The book deserves its stellar reputation.

*Seriously guys, he says right in the OP that he wants books on utilitarianism and y'all are recommending classical philosophy lol.

I actually appreciate it the Stoics are my favorite. I'd start with Seneca over Aurelius though, he's much more accessible. Epictetus is good too.

Epictetus is really great. I finished reading his works about a month ago, and I loved them. He seems like he was a delightfully sassy old man when interacting with his students.

Been trying to read Seneca now, but I'm finding his work less interesting. But I'm sticking with it still.