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PaperclipPerfector  7hr ago (text post)   181 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for January 21, 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:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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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New Year's resolutions check-in:

  • Posted my second blog post of the year on Monday (right down to the wire, it went up at 11 p.m.), about a particularly pernicious reaction to the Minneapolis shooting which seems to recur whenever a member of the opposing political tribe is killed or disgraced.
  • Went to the gym three times last week. Couldn't bring myself to go on Monday, so went yesterday afternoon instead. Can deadlift 1.73x my bodyweight for 6 reps, squat .88x for 10 reps and bench press .7x for 9 reps.
  • 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 five of 11 modules in the SQL course.
  • Have practised guitar for roughly one hour every day since January 1st.

How goes it, @thejdizzler?

  1. Work: Raw hours just not there: I let so many things cannabilize my work time and need to be better at not letting them. That being said, I am doing a very consistent job of actually doing stuff when I am working. I did all three replicates of an experiment last week, something that would have taken me a month a few years ago. Again things are trending up here.

  2. Fitness: hit 9 hours last week (11 if you include dancing). This week will be around 9.25-10 if all goes to plan (+2 hours dancing). I am feeling amazing, I would urge you all to try out this kind of training (really easy+high volume) and I won my first race of the year on Sunday ($50 purse).

  3. Intellectual stuff: published my second blog post of the year last week and the reception has been great. Have a few more posts cooking so may post a third thing this month. Still feeling overwhelmed with book club books and the hours aren't there for Spanish and Italian, although I start Italian class later today.

  4. Finances: On track for this month financially! Wish my work would release the W2 stuff so I can figure out how much I owe for taxes.

  5. Dating: Porn-free for the past week after last week's rant although not masturbation free. Matched with a very attractive (in my opinion, probably not objectively) Argentinian women on Hinge so may be going on a date sometime next week.

  6. Tarot continues to go well, although I am frustrated by my ex-roomate's current state of mind.

  7. Screen time. Is hovering around 2 hours on my phone. I took some pretty drastic steps to curb use (hard locks on adult content and locking the phone except for text, call, Lyft and maps after 9pm, both behind annoying passwords that would take me 15 minutes to get). Will report back next week but I imagine this will lower my screen time quite a bit. Computer time is hovering around ~8 hours a day, including work.

Have your post flagged to read! Seems like great progress in the gym!

What’s up with your ex roommate?

So he dropped out of our PhD program about a year ago (probably a fair move, but the way PhD programs work he should have just gritted it out). Since then he's been working at his dad's IT company and neither enjoying it nor doing a good job. The things that caused him to fail in the PhD are the exact same things that are causing him to fail in this new environment (poor work/life boundaries, inability to ask for help, ego). His entire life has become consumed with this boring job that he hates so it's not very fun to talk to him right now.

What do you think of SQL so far? It's one of my favorite tools

It's pretty nifty, and my day job involves SQL-based databases so it's nice to get some direct experience with the tool itself.

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