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Wellness Wednesday for August 5, 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).

Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

  1. Work. Work has been going well. I have been both much more productive and much less stressed. Turns out doing one thing at a time and taking frequent breaks means I get more done and am not exhausted during the day.
  2. Fitness. Unfortunately most of the weight loss was completely ephemeral (likely a combination of water loss from reduced glycogen stores and less fibrous shit sitting in my gut). However, I am feeling great running wise and have crushed my workouts last weekend/this week. 10 weeks until chicago. Weekly hours: 7.66 running.
  3. Intellectual stuff: Finished Foundation. Way more entertaining than Blood Meridian and I think it'll make for some great discussion in philosophy book club. I do have some very strong disagreements with the author's worldview, but that is not unexpected given when he was writing the book. Now am focusing very hard on Spanish (frustrated that my grammar and output seems to be so stuck) and economics.
  4. Finances: new roommate finally moves in this month which will help out finances ALOT. Ended up donating about $250 last month. 110 went to a yearly subscription to a substack I like (with no paid articles). The rest went to the guaranteed income program I'm part of. Monthly spending so far: $1703.
  5. Dating. Nothing.
  6. Tarot. Good session this weekend with my ex-roommate. Asked the deck about career moves and about my friend's romantic life.
  7. Socializing: Ran with my friend Monday morning and had a board game night with my lab yesterday.
  8. Screen time: 2.5 hours, need to get out of the bad habits engendered by the trip.
  9. Meditation: 5 minutes 4x last week. Little by little.