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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   656 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for August 5, 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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Replying because you're missing the obvious truth that different strategies work for different people and you do not always know why, especially by reading an internet post. First Toil then the Grave's plan may work for him splendidly, and not because he has some defect of character.

I'm not stupid. I couldn't miss that if I tried.

I have said, rather clearly:

  • For most people reading this, and possibly @FtttG, the negative consequences of their phone use is overstated, and compared against an ideal world that won't exist. And the positive benefits are, in turn, understated.
  • That this advice is tailored to the people reading it here, though I am willing to say much the same to most PMCs. I would not say the same thing to another large fraction of the human population.
  • And I have specifically noted that it's not a fault of FtttG's character.
  • There are intermediate steps worth considering before literally locking your phone away. I'm not sure if @FtttG has tried them, if he has, it's not mentioned here. If that hasn't worked for him, oh well, I'm happy to concede different strokes for different folk.

And I understand perhaps yours is just an instinctive desire to defend technology or modernism or whatever.

Really? Are we going to psychoanalyzing arguments here? I can't stop you, even if that is an incorrect assessment. I've read the relevant literature, and shared it. It's not a content-free claim.

It would be trivial for me to turn this around and say that to you, and many others raising objections, phones are a mythical boogeyman holding them back from self-actualization. As I pointed out to @Iconochasm, their utility is ridiculously high even with the dopamine-pumps removed. Did I want to say this? Not really. I wouldn't, if you hadn't. I think it's true anyway.

I did say perhaps. I qualified throughout. Admittedly I haven't read all your replies to everyone, only the one I was answering.

I personally don't have issues overusing my phone by my own standards of that term. I do have teenage sons who would benefit from giving the damn things a rest, as I repeatedly suggest to them. Parenthood informs my views to some degree, as does the fact that I lived well into adulthood before smartphones existed, so I remember a different world.

Sure phones "utility is ridiculously high" yes, I believe I granted you all of that. I think you might be slightly on defense though of course I'm not the shrink. I'll leave it.

Edit: I'm not leaving it because I am smugly convinced of my rightness, or your wrongness. But I think we're talking past each other to a degree and I'm not interested in taking part in a pile-on.

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