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PaperclipPerfector  11hr ago (text post)   250 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for January 14, 2026

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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New Year's Goals Planning on doing these updates every week to keep myself accountable

  1. Work: Finished a figure this week. Instituted a Cold Turkey block on texting/whatsapp/distracting websites (including theMotte) that has been a huge help for productivity. Raw hours still not there.
  2. Fitness: hit 8.5 hours last week and will be at 9 this week. Build up from here will be much slower. Still haven't been able to fully kick my cold, but NetiPot has been helping a lot.
  3. Intellectual stuff. Feeling a bit overwhelmed with all the books I'm wanting to read +making sure I get in Spanish and Italian immersion. Just got be disciplined about hitting my minimums and not multitasking.
  4. On track for this month financially! Cat sitting to earn a bit of extra money.
  5. This week has been bad for porn and masturbation. I'll come out and say it that I was really disregulated last year. Masturbating every day and sometimes even paying for OnlyFans despite knowing that this was terrible for me and that I was probably talking with a bot. I've luckily stopped doing that, but still have a long way to go.
  6. Tarot continues to go well.
  7. Screen time is hovering around 2 hours on my phone but is down on my computer after I implemented two rules: the block on distractions during work hours and no browsing while eating.
  • Went to the gym three times last week and on Monday, going again this evening: can deadlift 1.7x my bodyweight, squat .82x and bench press .67x.
  • Have not consumed any alcohol, fast food, fizzy drinks or pornography since waking up on January 1st, although I have snacked between meals quite a bit.
  • Have completed three of 11 modules in the SQL course.
  • Have practised guitar for roughly one hour every day since January 1st.

What is your interested in Tarot?

I think it's a powerful tool to connect with my subconscious. This guy on substack puts it best.

Just pray brother. Or read Meditations on the Tarot by Tomberg.

Have that book and am working my way through it slowly!

Oooh lovely. How'd you stumble upon it?

I'd be curious for your thoughts.

My roommate gave it to me for Christmas last year! I will let you know what I think after I've read it: I'll likely make a post on here and on my blog.

Your roommate sounds based as hell.

He is in a lot of ways! Definitely making a much more honest effort to thread the needle between Christianity and esoteric practices than I am (I have basically given up on the Christianity part, which is laziness). However, he's also very dysfunctional in a lot of other ways: he doesn't have a whole lot of agency so he ends up stuck in ruts/patterns that he doesn't like but can't get out of.

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sometimes even paying for OnlyFans despite knowing that this was terrible for me and that I was probably talking with a bot.

I'm asking in a spirit of curiosity and not of attack: how does one come to participate in this practice? What made you do it for the first time? Did you regret it at the time? Leaving aside moral disgust, do you feel like you get your money's worth?

I've never in my life paid for internet pornography (I have purchased the odd vintage magazine, and Mrs. FiveHour has a fondness for vintage Playboy calendars and puzzles as home decor, so strictly speaking I have paid for nude images of women). It always feels like a sharp line for me, where doing so would cause me to cross into some new kind of behavior and I recoil from it. In the same way that I can imagine eating or drinking a drug, I eat or drink other drugs and something stronger is a soft line, but I don't know how one comes to inject drugs.

For me it started when I was broken up with in the summer by a girl who was just not interested in me sexually. This did not make me feel good: not being desired sexually has always been a weak point in my otherwise pretty self-confident/self-assured persona. This left me pretty vulnerable to falling down the PornHub sales funnel of a star I liked. The experience made me feel pretty good in the moment: the women.bots are fairly good at making you feel wanted sexually, although if you look at it from the outside it's absurd because they have so little information about you (maybe a photo and a dozen messages). Afterwards I pretty much immediately regretted it: I deleted my account seconds after satisfying myself. Of course I didn't forget that the high was much better than regular porn, so whenever I felt particularly bad about myself I would relapse. I have, however, been completely clean since shortly after the New Year.

In terms of my moneys worth, if one thinks about it like a drug, it's not a terrible deal. These women's pages are usually around ~$5/month, but you end up paying extra for better content when you're interacting with them. I probably spent about $20/session, which is a lot, but not worse than what you would have to spend on alcohol or stronger drugs (weed I think is much cheaper).

I don't generally have problems with addictions in other areas of my life. I've never felt the need to drink more than a beer or two, and always need months or years long breaks between using weed or LSD. But sliding down the OnlyFans rabbit hole was a wake up call that maybe I do have some kind of masturbation/pornography addiction. The OnlyFans stuff really is a step up in degeneracy as you point out, but the whole edifice is rotten and needs to be knocked down. I'd like to stop caring so much about if women desire me or not (which is something I frankly can't control, and judging from statistics, is something that most men have to face). I also would be completely turned off by similar behavior from the opposite sex (gooning to romance novels), so before bitching more about how I don't have a girlfriend/am not married I should genuinely try to fight this addiction, which maybe means going to stuff like AA meetings.

Anyway thanks for reading all this.

Yeah, I've always drawn the line at paying for stuff, both because it feels like you're now financing your vice and because it feels cheating-adjacent, like sexting with your coworker or going to a strip club.

But I can understand why I would do it if my principles were weaker. Sometimes you stumble upon someone who just ticks 99% of your boxes and you want to see more, you think that if you get her to put shoe on head or wear a choker or strike just the right pose you will immediately reach that gooner nirvana.

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