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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   702 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for February 11, 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 resolution check in

  1. Work: Terrible week at work. Boss forgot to plug in the water supply to the fly incubator, so humidifier ended up cooking all our flies, including some stocks that it took me years to make! This sets me back a month or two which is really annoying.
  2. Fitness: 11 hours last week! Started track night Tuesday's again and had a surprisingly low heart rate for what I hope will be my marathon pace in October (workout was 8x 3 min at tempo, I averaged 5:50 pace and my heart rate was around 170, which is right at the edge of Z2/Z3 for me). I woke up a little wrecked this morning and skipped this morning's session: hoping this doesn't compromise volume for the week.
  3. Intellectual Stuff: Finished my first Spanish book this year and HP7 in Italian! Got my blog posts for this month planned, and got another paid subscriber on substack (it's my friend emory so it feels like it doesn't count.
  4. Finances: Going well this month. Earned $400 extra from opening a new checking account at Wells Fargo (guess they want my mortgage) and will be earning extra on cat sitting throughout the month.
  5. Dating: Had a pretty disregulated Sunday as I got super drunk at tavern run (~13 mile run+bar crawl) and ended up bypassing all my controls and masturbating to porn. Decided to pause all my dating apps and focus on building real life connections that may or may not turn into anything.
  6. Screen time on my phone is at an hour/day, despite my binge on Sunday. Need to update my controls to better prevent binging in the future.
  7. No tarot this week. Giving the ex-roomate some space.
  8. Socializing: Tavern run was awesome, always great to hang out with the whole running community here. Otherwise have had a good balance of social activity and rest this week. Would like to host a dinner party this month or next.

How goes it @FtttG and @oats_son? I enjoyed your blog post on rejection quite a bit last week FttG!

Earned $400 extra from opening a new checking account at Wells Fargo

I get these offers all the time and wonder why people aren't taking advantage of them more. I'm getting some for up to $850 at this point (from crappy banks but still).

These take an hour of effort, you can do them once every 2-3 months roughly, and even at this stage in my career I'm not making $400/hour. After taxes it's a bit less but still.

I think there are a few reasons.

  1. A lot of people don't have liquid cash. If you're living paycheck to paycheck you can't do this.

  2. This checking account isn't earning any MM interest. I either need to keep 1500 in there for perpetuity or go through the hassle of closing the account (which also would only take an hour or so). At less than 4% money market it's still worth it to keep the money there after the $400, especially as I can use it to just pay off my credit card every month.

Most of the ones around me require that you set up direct deposit, and avoiding an interaction with my HR department is easily worth $400.

Yeah, changing a DD target is just filling out a form in a web application for me, so if it's lamer than that I get it.

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