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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   1801 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for December 20, 2023

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? Do you make them? Do you keep them?

This year, I am thinking of the following priorities:

  1. Work hard(er). Get into the habit of hard work.
  2. Continue to meet new people, and maintain existing relationships

I came across The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, and I agree with all of them but "I wish I hadn't worked so hard." I actually wish I was working harder and really would like to maintain a consistent daily work habit. I managed this a couple of month this year but it dropped off at the start of October. I should probably read Atomic Habits even though I feel like I will know most of it.

I have more ideas floating in my head but I won't set them as goals just yet. I should tidy up and publish a crappy project I have, just to get it out there. I should release more work in general, or build in public. I want to perform in front of an audience. I should figure out how to leverage the internet to make friends online. I should get into climbing. I want to go on a solo trip somewhere. These are more specific and I might pick some of these later to focus on, but I know for sure those two priorities above define the general direction I want to go.

Last few years I haven't done much. Next year I want to get marginally more serious about getting employment, muscles, and romance.

Ware has an immense incentive to tell people what they want to hear.

I have two separate sets of things, one of them are resolutions in the sense of some substantial change that I intend to make and the other are a set of fitness goals that aren't changes, but specific targets. I generally keep the resolutions imperfectly, but better than if I never thought about it at all. The New Year is a great time to reset and think, "what should I be doing differently?". One of mine this year was to read more books, and I have indeed done so. Probably not as much as I would like, which implies that if I want to do that again, I should put a specific target on it going forward, but still, this was directionally correct. On the fitness end, I'll be setting targets for total pushups on the year and total miles run on the year - I'm very motivated by specific numbers and delight in completing goals with big numbers assigned to them. I will also have goals for race times, but these are less directly controllable than just kind of an expectation-setting thing for the next year.

No, it's too arbitrary of a label for me to buy into it. The best time to start anything was yesterday.

It's a nice checkpoint to consider the last year and strategize about the next.

You can do that now. If you need a reset of the Gregorian calendar to muster up enough will, you are fucked anyways.

Yes I can do it now, hence the post. Personally I don't think of it as strictly a 1st January thing. And the changing Gregorian calendar can provide a psychological framing that aids behavioural change.

I GET THAT !! But ask yourself who actually pulled off anything worthwhile because it was their new years resolution ? If you need soo much psycological framing, just don't do it.

I resolved to read more this year and I did read quite a lot more. That seems straightforwardly good.

I set concrete running goals and accomplished them (run X miles, run PRs, win at least one race). I might accomplish those without setting them at the beginning of a year, but having specific things to work towards helps structure the year.

What makes you think people aren't capable of doing that?

I omitted my priorities for last year for brevity, but 2023 was a success. I think we are getting hung up on the term "new years resolution". For me, it is not some frivolous goal picked out of a hat that I don't really care about.

Your entire life is psychological framing and you shouldn't underrate it.

for 2023 i resolved to lose weight. i technically did keep it so far .

Why the "technically"? Weight loss insignificant? Did you game the system by measuring your "weight" on the moon with mass held constant?

Maybe he got a haircut or decided to cut his fingernails short?

Taking a shit also does temporary wonders.

I would assume that falls under "insignificant", but one can't just assume, on the internet, that they're not speaking to a Mandarin or someone with really luscious locks.

Maybe he lost a limb.

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