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.
Notes -
General Updates
I finally made my first project and am a fourth of the way through with boot.dev, though real stuff begins now, it's still some progress. I have a GitHub account with repos, things I made, something I never did for the longest time. India is facing a concerta shortage, and if I cannot get any, I will still keep up with my work. I can crank out 9 hours max on a good day, after which I can barely read a book or even pay any attention to anything at all. This is a lot higher than what I expected, though I feel bad saying anything nice about myself. The entire process is extremely satisfying, my head is in a much better place when I can experience a real sense of progress in the right direction. A hard day of work feels nice, at least when I am done with it at night.
March
March is my favorite month of the year. My family was extremely invested in my academic success, March was when your academic calendar ended, so we would get a 3-4 week break where we had literally zero work. After exams, all the kids would visit these gaming parlors with PCs hooked up via LANs to play Counter-Strike with each other. I would watch movies with my cousins who would come to visit us for Holi. We would play video games all night on my pc, check out bougie cafes, discuss anecdotes from high school. I still feel some of that with my cousins, but I am not in touch with anyone from high school or even uni for that matter.
My strongest emotion for a long time was nostalgia, always wanting to go back in time. In uni I missed high school, in high school I missed middle school, in middle school I missed being in 5th grade. This pattern of thinking was parasitic because even if those years were better, I cannot relive them again. With enough effort, I actively look forward to the time I am in now and have a belief that the near future is genuinely going to be better. My love for video games died almost completely, all the cafes feel stale.
So, do you guys have any thoughts on what it feels like to grow apart from the people of your past life? Are there some things you did with them once that you no longer can enjoy? Many report a falling out with video games or partying.
For me it's not really about the activities, but the times and places I've left behind. I often miss the easy serendipity of college, where I didn't need to create a partiful and blast reminders in order to get 10 people to show up to an event. Shit, I could get 10 on a tuesday with 1 message to a group chat, now everyone needs a week notice because they have plans and 30 minute drives and on-call at the smoke alarm installer (Not a joke, one friend literally has this job and gets called to drive 2-4 hours to fix the smoke alarms at big corporate campuses).
But we can't live in the past, and tbh I'm not sure I'd want a bunch of college student friends right now even if the age gulf it wouldn't be a little weird. My current guests never clog sinks with vomit and the incidence of awkward friend group damaging breakups is down a solid 50%.
I definitely do miss just being able to walk places and have events going on, but that's a choice I made in exchange for living somewhere I can actually afford a house, so c'est la vie.
This is also why I liked Pai so much, it was a small town where you could just do what you wanted with other travellers without prior notice.
In my case, I never had a fun college or high school life, the last two years post uni were even worse due to my startup LARP so the bar for me is a lot lower. Good chance I do and think the way you do once I party a bit after my sabbatical.
Worth it imo, owning a house in a decent town and having savings really makes a difference. Unless its Manhattan and you are stuck with a 60 year mortgage lol. The US is quite unique this way, in India, you cannot buy a decent house unless you are involved in shady things. You get a third-rate run-down apartment in Delhi for the price of a ranch in a smaller blue state in the US, which would have a much better quality of life.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link