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 somehow managed to get out of a major months-long slump. Still not sure how. Salient aspects below, but most of them may be cause or effect and I don't know which.
Winter ended. It's warmer and less dark. Switching time zones is annoying, but I do appreciate summer time. I probably do get a major case of the SADs (Seasonal Affective Disorder) in winter, not that I'd ever go to anyone who might diagnose me. But psychospeak aside, I hate winter. I hate the cold and the dark and the denuded trees and the grey skies and the soggy ground and the feeble sun and the shortness of the days. I can get comfy at home, but it still feels like some kind of half-hearted afterlife with the best parts of living gone and not coming back for many months. It's still too cold to go swimming or cycling, but I'm planning to go on as long a hike as my busted knees will take to take in the springtime sights as soon as there's a sunny weekend.
Had some modest but tangible successes at work. It's been a slog before, and I'm still not doing anything praiseworthy, but right now I'm managing without needing to rope in others to help me out. Maybe I just lucked out and picked some easy tasks for once, but it's nice either way.
Managed to fix up my own codebase. I was immured by bugs of my own making from having been too sloppy, overambitious or just plain distracted in the past. Couldn't do anything without it falling apart thanks to the shamefully low level of code quality. Just about everything failed one way or another. I considered scrapping some features, quarantining others until I might fix them, and simplifying the rest until I might manage. I considered just trashing it all and starting over. I considered trashing it all and never starting over. Instead I sat myself down and did the only right thing - wrote tests. Wrote a lot of tests. There are still large swathes of code that are unusable right now, and it does take me serious effort, but it bears fruit. Bugs are getting fixed. Functionality is restored. And I even manage to add some new things and see them work out.
Marriage is much more harmonious. I get along better with the wife and we even managed to talk about some difficult topics without it devolving into pointless arguments. Wife has more patience for the child. Child is much more agreeable than she was a few months ago. We went on a trip and had a good time. Nice.
Successfully extricated myself from work-from-home for once and spent a day in the office. It was productive and I got a lot of workplace socializing done. The 4-hour commute sucks, but once in a while it's absolutely worth it. I try to make it once in a week, but so far I've been held up. I hope to get there again soon, maybe spend a night, get in a few hours of exercise and even meet some old friends.
Finished playing Cyberpunk 2077. See https://www.themotte.org/post/449/friday-fun-thread-for-april-14/88260?context=8#context . Mostly when I play games it's just to unwind, or to challenge myself, and I have a hard time justifying the waste of time. This one, for once, actually had me along for the ride purely for the story. I normally scoff at storytelling in video games - stories in games universally suck, why not just read a book instead? - but in this one case I'm convinced that it was actually well-served by its format. I'm still thinking about it days later. Still listening to related music (https://youtube.com/watch?v=p4cqqUUfy3A). Maybe I'm just impressionable, but somehow it's been a good impression and I feel that playing this game has somehow done me good.
None of my fundamental life problems are fixed, but somehow in spite of them it's going ever-so-slightly uphill right now. If it really is seasonal, then I hope very much that I manage to get as much as possible out of this season, and to prepare as well as possible for what comes after.
I too have SAD, or Summer Affective Disorder. It's fucking 42°C or 107°F out here, opening the window is like peeking into a blast furnace!
I'm going to stay in a small room and abuse my air conditioner as long as I can haha
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I wouldn't say I was in a slump, but my mood has improved significantly since quitting my job and moving to a hotter country. I don't mind the cold, but I've had my fill of dark cloudy days.
Part of that is quitting a repetitive factory job, I had no issue with the repetitiveness for nearly a year, had time to think, then the job stopped posing a challenge and I became irritably bored on every 12 hour shift.
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Glad to hear it! Even though we’re long past the seasons directly affecting our lives, I also seem to have deeply seasonal moods.
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