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).
Jump in the discussion.
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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.
This place is still a paradise compared to /r/ssc which has become Quora. ACX comments are looking rough too. I looked up to these people? Yeah, it's bad.
But another thing: You've grown. Communities don't grow, but individuals can. There's a chance you've absorbed whatever lessons TheMotte had to teach, and you're in a class full of students waiting for a new teacher. Stagnation is the fate of all adults, and like illness the best we can do is delay it. We are all destined to become boring, vegetative adults unless we have some process of continuous, lifelong self-transformation. Don't ask why TheMotte is failing to meet your needs. Ask how you're failing to meet your own needs, and then find a new teacher.
I think that's part of the problem - all of the "teachers" that interest me have been run off the internet or into some corner I don't know about. I don't even know where to look anymore.
Then the only remaining option is to either look outside the internet or stop relying on teachers.
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