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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Notes -
I am alive, I have blocked youtube, twitter, Instagram (deactivated my account back in October), Reddit and everything distracting from my laptop and my phone. My co-working idea from 2023 finally took off, I co work with two other people, one being my mentor, the other being an extremely competent friend of my age who si may age.
Progress so far
I am nearly done with Math Foundations 3 which is MathAcademy's final pre-university module that also covers calculus right before Multi variable calc. I will head on to Logic and proofs followed by Discrete Math. Math for ML will follow these two. In the meantime, I will do some math that I learnt in Math Foundations 1, 2 and 3 from a rigorous textbook so that I have a decent level of mastery and fluency with regard to math. I ultimately want to be a really good research ML engineer.
My mathacademy total xp is now close to 11k, every xp is worth a minute or more, it feels trivial compared to people who do real STEM stuff at a high enough level but I know how hard differential equations, sub topics in integration was. It seems laughably easy once I have done it but I can never appreciate myself for doing any of it. Its way beyond what I ever did, I just dont like myself enough to say anything nice, not being whiny, I dont want to be known as the guy who considered basic math literacy to be a milestone. I hit 180 or 3 hours in an airport and one time in a fucking train with a pinhole light, without even having a seat to sit properly on. The same guy who could not study for a decade, pissed away his chances at grad school, flunked two classes was able to do something that. I do respect myself for that though, quite a bit.
I dropped Clojure and front end, opting to double down on Python instead. I do Boot.devs material; I finished their OOPs course a few minutes ago. I will do the Python workbook and aim to finish that in three weeks while doing my daily three hours of math and an hour of Boot.dev. I will still need money since I wont be able to afford meds after july but I will find some ways around that, my sabbatical will last at least 4-6 more months.
My life is boring in ways. I wake up, work out (three days), meditate, study, and sleep. My phone time is much lower since I track it and would be zero if I were not a massive coombrained person. Which is why I also nuked all the images I had of girls from my past life. That stuff will not help me live now.
If I am late in posting updates, know that I am in a better place than what I started in. 6 years ago I posted here and on slatestarcodex as a delusional cram school kid who was shit scared of failing his high school equivalent exams and never getting to a uni. It took me half a decade but I am at least on an ok track now. My co working mates are genuinely very good engineers and they do celebrate my progress but I cannot feel nice.
Maybe I will in some time. My time here has always been great, this is not a goodbye post, I will post, I am just not going to be as regular but I will update. People here saw me go through life and I think they deserve to read the good parts too.
Routines
Working out first thing in the morning kickstarts my concerta. I feel relief climbing out of the dingy pajeet gym I work out, the stairs connecting the basement to the ground, lit up with the sun. My mind feels clear after I meditate, I feel zero friction when I work. The day feels amazing, my only issue is sleeping on time, I must sleep by 11 daily and did that zero fucking times in all these months. It pisses me off and makes my bi onthly therapy session feel like a waste since she wants me to sleep by 11 every day to help fix my circadian rhythm. 1:30 am right now, fuck. Sleeping full 8 hours should do wonders for my life.
Birthdays
My grandad turns 92 this Saturday. We are throwing a party and it reminded me of my more recent Wednesday update about nostalgia. I remember watching movies with my cousins in late March, playing Holi and all four of us (the two of them and my younger brother) being there for grandads birthdays. We get the front yard done and throw a large get-together. This year, neither of them are turning up for his birthday, thier mom, my aunt is since she can't miss her dad's birthday but I do feel a little bad about it. You cannot go back, still for a moment, I wish they came. We even had a golden week where we saw holi, grandads birthday and a literal movie shoot happen in the same week. They shot a movie in our front yard since I live in a large old-fashioned house, ones built for feudal lords of the day. Remembering it makes me smile. We spent the entire night playing FIFA, saw a lot of decent movies and I got introduced to electronic music via Swedish House Mafias albums. Not the best music but I still mosty listen to electronic music, much better kind though.
Oneitis
The girl I was into out of my betaness and low status is now just another girl. A friend of mine recently told me about bumping into her in a nightclub in Delhi where she was coked out of her mind, chatting up everyone whilst looking fatter. In that moment I felt sad for her. Every girl I have ever always ends up worse once I lose my rose-tinted glasses and she seems the same honestly. Doing substances in a bar with your friends and going back home to your parents, working a dead-end job where you only make enough to live paycheck to paycheck because you have a lifestyle to afford (do not blame her here tbh, the Indian economy is the culprit). For the first time, I felt a lot of pity for her. I was 21, 4 years ago exactly when I posted about how she was sleeping around with other guys, being super emotional about it instead of manning up and just meeting her. Me from the past would not believe that I genuinely don't like her at all now.
Why post
Moreover, I am coming to terms with the fact that things have changed, the people I knew in the past, are well in the past and they should stay there. I am still unemployed, unskilled, skinny and living with my parents but I am better each day. Every day I try my hardest to be better, or at least try harder at trying my hardest. I am in the top 5 percent of both math academy and boot.dev, much higher in mathacademy, maybe top 5-10 people all time in terms of weekly volume done.
I just hope that I can continue my progress and that everyone around me is alive, happy and healthy to see me do well. I came to this place at a very difficult time in my life, everyone here helped me be who I am in a very literal sense. Strength training, meditation, pua, a pursuit of mastery, and the belief that I can do better, are things I picked up along the way. Some kind souls still read my life's updates and my new arc of being a guy who learns math and backend engineering to eventually do cutting-edge ML stuff is not all that exciting.
My bad days are about 4 hours and at about hour 8, I can no longer work, though I suspect with enough practice, I can stretch that to 12 but that will take a while. Working on hard things, learning this stuff, meditating, working out, all of it is extremely humbling. Every single session makes me aware of just how far behind I am from where I wish to be. The bright side is that each time, I get better. Many in life just mentally check out and live in deluded fantasy lands where they are too smart to do anything, only to wake up at 40 and realise that they have failed at life. There are days when my brain just gives out and it is satisfying in a way. Every time I drag myself out of the gym having struggled with benching less than 135, I get closer to benching 225 or dipping and chinning half that as long as I don't get injured and don't miss a session. 225 is not unreasonable in a year given I am quite untrained.
Coda
Life is not something that happens to me, I have some control over it. Everyone I know besides a few is out of shape, sad, not earning as much as they wished to, and living in total denial of reality. That was me too, for the longest time. @Standard_Order once told em to seek sun and steel, and chase natural happiness, I get what he meant now.
My posting history makes me cringe, a lot. Why would someone like me post about his life on a place dedicated to culture war discussion, why even would the people there help and how on earth did I not get banned years ago? I posted earlier because I had nothing going on in my life, the attention I got online helped soothe that, and now I am making some progress, which makes me care less about it, hence the abstinence from twitter.
Thank you, to everyone on the motte, to all the people I befriended here, everyone who cared enough to help me. Remember, mrvanillasky is going to get better. May the gods help me, may they help us all.
Hari Om!
I think I mentioned you re: coworking but never got a response.
I apologise, lemme find the link
edit - cannot find it
I am on a coworking space daily, 6 days a week. Helps a lot, I also track my screen time publicly, post my stuff done there daily. I cannot find where you mentioned me though
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