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Wellness Wednesday for February 15, 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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This isn't really an answer to your question, but I've been trying to do this more as well, and in real time online communication too (voice-chat). It's surprisingly difficult and keeps you on your toes quite a bit because of a few reasons: (1) You don't have any time at all to think about what you want to say. (2) The conversation can get schizophrenically dragged in a huge number of directions. (3) There is a lot of very superficially convincing woke leftist rhetoric to combat. This can make you really scramble to keep up, especially if you get dragged onto territory you weren't expecting to have to defend and you immediately have to recall all arguments and evidence that refute their talking points on the spot while trying to word it in a way that makes sense, captures the nuance of the issue and isn't particularly inflammatory. There are thousands upon thousands of sources I've read (both academic and otherwise) on the culture war, and trying to recall and explain topics I've not prepared for in detail sucks especially when the topics are of considerable complexity. It's not uncommon for me to recall some really good arguments and examples after the fact and go "Fuck me, I should've thought to mention that".

There's a reason why academic debate and inquiry is done in written format, and why competitive real-time debates are often scoped appropriately so they stick to a certain topic and preparation is possible beforehand. This is not the case in the muck of real-life, colloquial debating where debates can just unpredictably manifest in a casual conversation and the topic being debated can subsequently drift. You (and your opponent too) are never able to give the best version of your argument, but the woke leftist has an edge in these discussions because they are armed to the teeth with simple, socially accepted truisms that are just taken to be a given. If you're sufficiently prepared, you can do really well in combating them, but you often can't anticipate everything that gets thrown your way and there will sometimes be moments when you find yourself mentally scrambling to recall things and structure your response. Your information retention and speaking skills need to be very good to handle these discussions.