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Wellness Wednesday for April 26, 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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I imagine it's pretty hard for a society to be all three of high trust, wealthy/developed, and open to immigration/naturalization. If you're high trust and wealthy (e.g. Japan, Singapore), you need to have a somewhat strict stance toward immigration, or at least naturalization, to prevent economic migrants from breaking that high-trust equilibrium. Conversely, if you're wealthy and liberal about immigration (e.g. US, Canada), it's unlikely you'll manage to build a high-trust society. And finally, If you're open to immigration and manage to remain high trust, that's probably a sign that nobody wants to immigrate (I can't think of any obvious examples here but plausibly some poor but peaceful country could fit the bill).

I think your best bets would be one of (1) compromising on citizenship for yourself by picking one of the high-trust + developed but xenophobic countries and securing citizenship for your kids via jus sanguinis if you don't have a partner yet, or (2) finding a smaller-scale, high-trust community within one of the wealthy + immigratorily liberal countries.