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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Notes -
Hey Wellness Wednesday, I've completely lost faith in the motte this week. See I've used "I think I fucked up my niece/nephew by playing a single song/tv show/movie" as a premise about a dozen times over the course of my life, and the only time it was taken seriously was with a group of college freshmen. Everyone else immediately understood that it was a premise, because you would have to be totally disconnected from reality to think a single piece of media reshaped someone's entire worldview. 100% disconnected, Being There disconnected.
But the thing is, I know the motte isn't full of freshmen, it's full of gen xers and millenials. And yet posting here was the second time my ridiculous premise was taken seriously. I used to make jokes 10 times as convoluted on /r/cwr and everyone got them, and when I'd do one on the motte I'd get accused of going for cheap laughs!
So it brought to mind a lot of other things I have noticed over the past few months, which can be summed up like this - I no longer believe I am stupider than the average motter. But, and this is the important part - I still know I'm a fucking idiot. Half of the cwr threads might as well be written by markov bots these days, there are still quite a few insightful comments every week, but so much of the rest is just rote bullshit. Just everyone talking down to each other, using passive aggressive laziness to evade the modhats - but not even making it entertaining, it's just talking points vs talking points.
I want to feel stupid again. I want to have to bring my a-game again. I don't know how to make that happen.
I'm not sure it's a lack of intelligence, exactly. Smart and independent people usually have some (or many) strange beliefs they've worked their way into - it's just impossible to get the thousand complicated judgements you make every day all correct if you make any attempt to think about them yourself, and you won't be making the same mistakes everyone else makes. And as a result it's entirely plausible a motte member would have a dumb fear of introducing their kid to a movie. There have been stranger premises in Wellness Wednesday questions. And some of the very intelligent people I know personally have much dumber anxieties in their personal lives. I was skimming, thought the premise was kinda dumb (everyone makes dumb posts sometimes), upvoted Pasha and moved on. Maybe if I'd thought about it for more than three seconds it'd be weird that you'd take the implied political position, but whatever.
Also, some of the people who you say 'took the bait' are some of the best posters, so I don't really think it's strong evidence of anything.
I agree, like I said it brought to mind a trend in have been noticing. Pasha is very insightful and orthoxerox is one of my favourite posters. The problem isn't that the level of intelligence has dropped, or I guess it is, but it's not that motters have lower intelligence, it's that nobody thinks for three seconds about anything unless it's their hobby-horse. Like @f3zinker, @ThisIsSin and @bolido_sentimental said, the engagement has turned superficial.
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