致我的 2024To My 2024

Standing at the end of 2024, this is the least ordered stretch of my life so far. My day job has no visible future and I'm getting by one day at a time; my own venture has only just started and shows not a trace of certainty; and there are other things I'm exploring and evaluating at the same time. My relationship is half long-distance, the apartment hasn't been handed over yet, and I don't even have a fixed base to live from. So looking back on 2024, it was really the process of that sense of order being broken piece by piece — from starting to prepare myself for it to having it smashed outright. Some of it was chosen, some of it wasn't; some of it was a delight, some of it hurt. Looking back, the light boat has passed ten thousand mountains. I'm completely different from the me of a year ago: living a different life, thinking about different things, looking forward to a different future.

It started around the beginning of this year, when I assessed my work situation and simply couldn't predict how much longer it could hold. Everything in sight was bad news, so I wanted to at least explore what was in sight. Thinking it over, two directions were worth exploring: building something of my own, for the higher ceiling, or going abroad, for the range of possibilities.

So Xiao Liu and I split up the exploring — I'd take the venture, he'd take overseas — on the condition, of course, that we'd still be together. The first half of the year ran as that kind of horse race inside an otherwise calm life, and we agreed that whichever road opened up first, we'd tilt our life toward it.

It's hard now to remember how I prepared myself mentally for either path, because both had so many unknowns, and I was fairly passive overall, with big mood swings as I took in information. But the last few years of thinking about mood swings and the randomness of the future weren't wasted — I could feel that the moment where quantitative change becomes qualitative was drawing closer.

Judging by how it turned out, I didn't stay close enough to the venture exploration in the first half, and progress wasn't as good as I'd imagined; doing a thing really is beset with difficulty, and there were plenty of problems I hadn't anticipated. Xiao Liu has more grit and was lucky enough — he got an offer from a new Saudi sovereign fund before we left for the Paris Olympics. So our life clearly turned toward the overseas road.

After most of a year of preparing myself and nearly two months of formal preparation, we finally set foot on the mysterious land of Saudi Arabia in mid-October. The original plan was for me to open up new business there and help our portfolio companies expand into the Middle East. But I quickly saw the problems. Life there is terrible: the climate, the infrastructure, and worse, the differential treatment of women, the immature commercial society, and a government that isn't modernized. Even now it's hard for me to judge whether my decision that I couldn't stay came from fear of the difficulty or from reason genuinely telling me this road doesn't work. But when I found that I had to bring up my partner in order to socialize there, and that I felt trapped in body and mind — even developing some physical symptoms — I knew I had to leave.

Of course, rebuilding life after coming back has been full of difficulty too. Our new apartment won't be handed over until early next year, so we're making do in the meantime, which inevitably means a drop in quality of living. Xiao Liu is still based in Riyadh, so our time together is always rushed. And I had to rethink where my working life should center. That's when I walked back onto the road of building my own thing — you can only push it forward with your boats burned behind you. Once I threw myself in, things did look more controllable, but I also saw more problems and more uncertainty. The intensity of the day job has dropped a lot, though it still takes real effort to maintain while I watch for a turn in private markets — and end-of-year me is more pessimistic than start-of-year me. I've glimpsed some other roads too; abandoning them outright seems a waste, but doing them takes attention, and I don't know which way to go.

And so this year I arrived at a state with almost no sense of order at all. If the me of a few years ago had known life would one day hold this little certainty, he would have panicked. And yet I genuinely feel I've entered the best state of my life. For the past two years I'd been telling friends I thought I could enjoy some randomness. Now that the randomness has actually arrived, I really can sit and joke with it. Right — how would you know what kind of future is truly worth looking forward to?

At the same time, it was inside all this uncertainty that I gradually found where my certainty actually comes from: relationships. My interactions with my partner, my parents, my friends are the steady source of my energy. A settled road has never given me a sense of security. The question I can't answer right now, of course, is how I'd hold myself together if the certainty I'm counting on one day changed.

In last year's review I said my hope for this year was to explore the world from a different angle and myself along more dimensions. I think I did it. This year I restarted trips with my parents, went back to Paris for the Olympics — a genuinely unforgettable experience — went to Africa for the first time, spent close to a month in Saudi Arabia, and tried a new rhythm of living. All told I spent nearly two months outside the country this year, and my range went from nearby Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia to Europe, Africa and the Middle East. More importantly, I went deeper into what makes each place different and interesting, experiencing them through religion and culture — only by stepping outside your own culture can you find where some of your own fixations came from, which is a rather interesting experience in itself. So I hope 2025 keeps up the exploring, of the world and of myself. My moment of the year was in Kenya, at sunset, a family of giraffes walking through the evening light. In that moment time seemed to stop; the vast, healing feeling of the savanna shook me deeply. I hope next year brings me closer to nature and to more of those moments near the source of life.

This was also the year I got fluent with AI and could no longer do without it. Using AI has become a habit at work and in life, hugely improving how efficiently I learn and work, and changing a lot of my methodology. I followed it closely and was often disappointed, but that doesn't change my sense that AI is the next systemic world-changing opportunity. Many business models are still immature, nobody knows where this goes, and there's difficulty everywhere. Still, I want to keep myself sharp and hold the right vantage point on this big change.

As for hopes for next year — surprisingly I don't want to wish for concrete goals the way I used to. I just hope I can take hold of the opportunities in my hands and push them forward as far as I can. There's a certain anticipation in not knowing what flower the seed you planted will open into.

One more moment that moved me this year: hearing Suddenly Myself again at a KTV gathering in Saudi Arabia. It's a parting song full of warmth, and listening to it felt like the me of the past saying goodbye to the me of now — very much in tune with where my head has been, and quite affecting.

Right — if this life is all there is, what use is starting over?

To my 2024, my twenty-eighth year.