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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They say man plans and god laughs.
I think I’ve been pretty in-tune with the techno-capitalist zeitgeist.
Any philosophical framework needs to address death—as much a constant of life as the sun setting each day.
How does the rat-diaspora do this? Rationally of course! With statistics. But the lower parts of our brains don’t understand statistics, so the real message is this: if you’re 64 you’ll get another 16 years according to the actuarial tables. If you’re completely healthy, run daily, have a highlighted and annotated copy of your medical records—if you’re literally doing everything right and within your power to take care of yourself—you can shade that up a couple years.
But that’s not true—you can do everything right and be perfectly healthy and suddenly die anyway, as the statistics tell us.
Have you ever experienced real “denial”? When the facts tell you “1+1=2 and also fuck you” and you just shake your head and think “no, that can’t be right, maybe 1+1=3 and my life is still good.” The power of rational thinking vs the surge of more primal, ancient ways.
So how do I cope with this? Our thinkers seem to prefer to avoid it, or throw Hail Marys on radical life extension tech. The modern way would be therapy. The traditional way, which got my ancestors through innumerable tragedies, is the church.
But I need something—I don’t think it’s healthy to live in a cold, unfeeling world ruled by randomness. (After all, that’s not how the West was won, was it?)
And if you're a billionaire or have a reputation for war crimes, you can bump that up to 100. Joking aside, your family tree is more predictive of how long you will live than actuarial stats. But even then, it comes down a lot to one-off factors, which can be mitigated or prevented with screening. Avoiding the big ones like heart disease or cancer and you can reasonably expect to live to 95+.
This attempt at joke is not funny.
Ye, just win a genetic lottery bro. Not as unfunny as previous joke, still not rational. Tips on being rich: be born in 1st world country. It's easy, almost a billion people managed to do that, why can't you?
many people live to 95. hardly like winning a lottery. and with advances in medical technology, the odds increase. Someone who is 40 today has greater odds of living to 90 than someone who was 40 fifty years ago.
Many? Quick GPT question says 11.3% americans live up to 95. I wouldn't call this many.
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