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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General life update
Fall is really finally here in Baltimore and it’s put me in a reflective mood. As I posted about a few weeks ago, I’m feeling generally behind in life, but some things are starting to turn around while other things remain frustrating.
Work. I’m currently a senior PhD student at Hopkins in Biology. On paper I have enough to graduate (first author publications, enough data to make a sufficient dissertation), but my committee and PIs won’t let me graduate for a variety of reasons. These all make sense: hostile administration means academic jobs are pretty hard to get right now, I have a federal fellowship so my funding is secured until Aug 2027, and a stronger publication record won’t hurt me at all. However, I’m getting pretty sick of my project, and of science in general. I don’t like how this job makes me feel on a day to day basis, or feel that the experiments I’m doing are really helping the world. I have two options going forward: coast until my funding runs out and spend my time and energy on other parts of my life + job searching, or buckle down and produce something I’m proud of in the next year. In either case, I need to start looking for industry jobs.
Fitness. I just ran the Baltimore marathon this past Saturday in a 2:44. This beats my Boston time from earlier this year by about ~5:00, which I’m really happy with, considering the course is much harder. I closed in a 5:14 mile, meaning I had a lot left in the tank. This whole year has been a struggle with constant left foot injuries because of my increased weight: I’ve put on 15 pounds, mainly of muscle, in the past year from swimming, biking, and lifting, so I was really happy with this effort, even though it’s far off my PR. In 2026 I’m planning on focusing on almost solely strength and aerobic development (I.e. trying to get my volume to a consistent 15 hours a week, 3 of which will be in the gym) which I hope will lead to smashing my PRs later in that year and in 2027.
Intellectual stuff. I passed my Spanish B2 fluency exam earlier this year, and am starting to work more seriously on Italian. Both languages are going well, especially Italian, in which I feel like I’m making rapid progress. The philosophy book club I run has got a couple of new, very enthusiastic and knowledgeable members, and we are currently doing a deep dive on Kant. I’ve also hit my reading goal of 52 books this year, and will probably end up reading around 60-70, which is pretty solid work. Substack blogging is going really well too, over 100 subs, and I’m putting out at least 2-3 pieces a month. This category is going really well
Finances. Recently read Your Money or Your Life and have been trying to figure out how to save more money and become more financially independent. I make about $52k a year, and was able to save even when I made $35k/year, so I should theoretically be able to have a near 30% savings rate. Unfortunately inflation (real and lifestyle) has increased my CoTL quite a bit, and now at my best all I can seem to manage is around a 15% savings rate. Part of the solution to this is just to earn more (i.e. get my PhD) but there’s also significant expenses that I can cut involving travel and running related expenses (mainly PT). I’m also trying to be wiser with investment decisions, splitting 0.33/0.33/0.33 between individual stocks, index funds and bonds. Long term my parents have told me they will help me buy a house (they contributed a lot to my sister’s apartment in London), so that’s a big relief in some ways.
Dating. I’ve kind of given up on this right now. I’m luckily out of my bad living situation with the Don Juan roommate, so I’m not having my lack of dating success rubbed in my face at all times anymore which is huge. Thought there might be something with a med student who I did swim club with, but when I cooked lunch for her one on one, it quickly became pretty clear she wasn’t interested in me. Dating apps don’t do anything other than lower my self esteem, although I did recently change my location to Santiago, Chile and have been absolutely inundated with matches. A lot of them are quite attractive, but they’re all like 5’ 0” which is a little too short for me. This is probably something that will go better when I am more financially successful, but continues to be frustrating.
Spirituality. I still haven’t been to mass since February (other than for a wedding), and have almost certainly decided that Christianity isn’t for me. Part of this is emotional: I don’t feel anything anymore when I go to church or receive the Eucharist, and prayer and other Catholic teachings have had very little effect on curing me of my vices (pornography, masturbation, jealously, anger, etc.). Part of it is social: aside from godfather, his marxist catholic friend from Chicago, and my former roommate, I’ve found that most of the people I met at church to be not the kind of people that I enjoyed spending time with. However, I think by far the biggest issue is philosophical: I think the antropocentrism of Christianity is deeply poisonous to our interactions with the natural world, the required submission to church dogma to be grating, and the ideas of heaven and hell to cheapen the existence we have here on earth right now. There are parts of Christianity I really like, but I just can’t get over these disagreements. It’s just really not for me. I would like to find another organized religion that works better for me, but I don’t think this is likely, as most Neo-pagans are a bunch of larpers, Buddhism and Hinduism are too foreign, and Islam is not appealing at all to me.
Health. I am sleeping through the night again, my sugar cravings are gone, and I’m feeling much more energetic overall. My weight is stable at 165 pounds, and I’m starting to see more visible muscle in my abs and arms. Two key changes were better sleep hygiene (no electronics between 9 and 7 am except for social reasons, no working in my bed, consistent wind-down routine), and rebalancing my macros away from carbs and towards fats on days without intense exercise. Keto is a pretty stupid diet, but that doesn’t mean eating only carbs is good either. Because I was working out so much I thought I would be fine mainly living off starches, vegetables and fruits, but because of this carb dependency my blood sugar would crash in the middle of the night and I would always wake up starving. I’ve added much more fat to my diet, replacing oatmeal with avocado toast for breakfast, and all carb snacks with nuts on days that I don’t exercise hard. I’m still eating carbs, especially on days where I do a couple hours of training, but it’s more balanced than before. This has fixed pretty much all my sleeping problems and made me much more energetic throughout the day.
Emotions. This year marks ten years since my last high school cross country season. That was a fantastic season for me: I dropped 70 seconds in the 3 mile and managed to be All-State in Illinois despite being at the back of the varsity pack the year before, and the camaraderie we had as a team was something I’ve never experienced otherwise, before or since. I’m feeling a lot of nostalgia for that time, and regret that I didn’t work to keep up those friendships in college and beyond. However, beyond a certain point, these things aren’t really helpful to feel anymore, and I’m wondering how I should act on them. Reach out to these old friends and try and organize a reunion? Try harder to find an adult cross-country team?
Long post, but just want to get all this out there in a place where people usually have something valuable to say. Thanks for coming to my TED talk
Glad to hear your philosophy reading group is going well! They're not easy to run, currently working on rescheduling mine (we went too deep into Deleuze and scared most of the members off).
No reading group is easy to run. People continually flake, don't do the reading, or try and take over the group to the kind of reading they want to do (despite a terrible track record of attendance). That said, it's been easier since I established a solid core group of 2-3 other people. I know they will do the readings and participate, so the other crap is just noise.
Yeah the solid core is really important - mine shrunk to two of us, hence trying to return to the "group" aspect. My guys in the group are all great but pretty hard to get onboard regularly. The really impossible thing is coordinating time zones, if it wasn't for that we'd have a great core, but as it is you're basically forced to choose between Californians and Euros.
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