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Wellness Wednesday for March 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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Please reccomend me a generalist History book for dummies, something not woke or overly opinionated.

History is my weakest subject and as a result Im impotent when I get Eulered with references to the Mesopotamians and the Akadians and the Anglo Saxons and the Carthagians and the Kievan Rus or whatever and how something happeneed to them that disputes a statement I am making about modernity.

Im looking for something like a CIA handbook for history, something to get me upto speed quickly.

Susan Bauer's History of the Ancient World seems a pretty good overview of Antiquity up to the fall of Rome, although I'll admit I've read only parts of it. The Great Transformation is a wonderful primer on the origin of all major religions and philosophical traditions of Eurasia. In general Erenow's archive is full of gems (though I also notice a couple that are pretty much pseudohistory). I don't know if the site itself has any particular political bias, but the books are all over the place in that sense.

Initially considered recommending Bauer's book, so I guess I'll just second that.