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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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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If an American is afraid that the USA (or really anywhere) is becoming a low-trust society, and want to immigrate somewhere that will maintain/be a high trust society in the future (for future kids etc), where should they go?
Assume they have a bachelors degree, enough money to live in most places for a few years without income, and willing to learn languages/assimilate into local culture. Ideally there is a path to naturalization and that it doesn't take >10 years (i.e. rules out UAE), and ideally path to citizenship is reliable (probably rules out Singapore as hearing it's hard to acquire citizenship there now).
Where would you suggest?
How do you describe banning and confiscating guns from civilians over a weekend or over a couple week period embarking on a zero-covid strategy which required strict lockdowns for the majority of multiple years applying to most of the population as "without major swings in policy"? Or sending government thugs to harass and threaten anyone speaking against the policy? Or sending government thugs to harass and threaten any person who didn't want the covid injection? Or any number of other totalitarian/authoritarian measures NZ took over hysteria of the last few years?
If what New Zealand did during the covid hysteria can be accurately described as not a quick, major swing in policy, I honestly shudder to think of what more awaits the people there. Even if one were to accept a government which accepts next to zero deviation from strict, overnight concocted mandates could still be described as "high trust," high-trust societies and distrust in government are not mutually exclusive. And in those cases, a fair amount more distrust in government dictate and authoritarianism would go a long way.
In the late 00s and early 10s, I was considering taking NZ up on their "tech" grant/visa program by moving my small company (since sold) there and thank God I decided against it. In any case, the dogooder authoritarian hysteria which has overtaken New Zealand which could be seen in firearm bans and confiscation, tobacco use bans and comically high taxation, and the covid lockdowns/covid injection lunacy should be a big red flag to any person thinking about moving there. The same is true if to a slightly lesser extent for the behavior of Canadians and Canadian government as well.
The last few years have really been an eye-opening experience for any person looking for a new country to live.
The key bit here is "interact with." It's possible for a high-trust community to dislike or distrust some distant authority figures who rarely meddle in their affairs, but if it's the actual day-to-day representatives of government within the community who aren't trusted, then your community is by definition low-trust. What has happened in America over the past several generations is that what were once two separate domains of "trusted figures of local government" and "suspicious characters far away in Washington who need to be watched" have become merged in practice and in people's minds into a single thing called "the government" and rather than spreading trust upwards to the federal level it has spread distrust downwards to the local level.
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