致我的 2025To My 2025

Right up to the start of December this last month didn't feel real. In all that calm there was none of the usual anticipation of a year ending. Maybe it was the weather too — warm enough that winter never arrived — and then I looked up and found we were already in the last month of the year. But with the blow this month dealt and the shift it put me through, by year's end I genuinely felt the year closing, this page about to fall.

This might be the richest year yet. Going back through my journals, I find that what I was thinking about was completely different every month or two, and the shape of my life changed enormously as well.

The first quarter I was drifting; the journals are almost all scenery on the road and the relief of finally landing somewhere to catch my breath. Strange to say, those dense little realizations — less than a year on, I can't recall a single one.

The second quarter, triggered by the potential risk to Xiao Liu's job, was a frantic one, and then I ran into some problems in the thing I wanted to build and fell into pain and second-guessing.

The third quarter I started a new life: moved into the new place and did the renovation, and two weeks in the US poured some life energy back into me. After coming home I settled into a concrete, quiet life and started doing things I'm interested in that aren't especially utilitarian.

The last quarter, a crisis brewed inside the calm and finally broke in a way I hadn't imagined, and I began rethinking the angle I'd taken on many of this year's questions, and the choices ahead.

What I think about, and the dimensions I think along, have changed enormously too.

Early in the year, maybe because I was slowly losing hope in the career track, I felt much less FOMO than before. Then the cycle warmed up at year's end, seemingly confirming a lot of what I'd thought earlier — though where it goes from here still needs a lot more exploring. Working on my own thing brought swings and shifts in my state I hadn't felt before; you could call it exploring myself further, but honestly the disappointment in myself far outweighs the approval.

The change in my thinking over the past few years came mainly from gradually realizing that many things are society's invisible shackles, and that once you break out of them they can't actually dictate anything to you. This year was different again: having genuinely broken out, I felt enormous freedom and ease, and also more confusion — because I realized that a lot of my earlier happiness was in fact built inside the social system, even built on comparison. What is the happiness I want made of? Which parts arose from me and which were shaped into me? It's genuinely hard to tell apart. New questions surfaced too: setting convention aside, what am I actually resisting — society, or my own genes? And on what I want and how to rank it, sometimes it's clear and sometimes it blurs.

But at the end of the year I was hit by something enormous: losing a family member, which sent me back to rethinking some things. My grandmother's hypoglycemic episode in September did serious damage to her body, but her going in the end was still completely sudden. It turns out that when a person dies, the world really does carry on exactly as before — and yet it's so hard to imagine that she's really not here. Going through the whole process, my first time at a funeral home, my first time watching a person actually pass into disappearance, still felt wrenching and staggering. Having seen a whole life through to the end, I fell into deep thought.

It seems you really can take nothing with you from one pass through a life. So should you leave something behind — or believe you carry your karma into the next round? This is a very fundamental question about priorities. I might once have thought experience was enough and there was no need to force anything, but when someone close to you actually disappears, it hit me like a thunderclap: those experiences and memories won't exist either, and may even stop existing before death does.

None of these questions has an answer yet.

How I experience life is shifting too.

This year I held a small, easygoing wedding of my own. Being married feels exactly as I expected — nothing much changes. Which figures: even with the truest soulmate, most of the coursework is still your own, and you still have to explore it and solve it yourself.

Early in the year there was one small trip after another, and looking back, drifting like that meant I couldn't recharge quickly. There was a little novelty in it, but the traveling kept draining my appetite for life, until that drain hit its limit in Turkey in May. I even started to question the meaning of my appetite for life itself.

But the return of stability in the second half fed me again. The trip to the US, the US Open, the Lady Gaga concert, the nourishment of friends and of nature — all of it gave me the best travel experience of my year, and opened the doors of sensation and experience back up.

At the end of the year I also went to a Twice concert — my first time in a standing pit, and it was so, so good. Seeing a K-pop stage with my own eyes for the first time was so, so overwhelming. It turns out a stadium can give you the feeling of a small theater.

About the future, I've genuinely thought about it less these past two years. I've accepted randomness and I enjoy the life in front of me. The first eleven and a half months of this year were already the most perfect version I can imagine, and I had no motive to break it — I could only wait for the day it got broken for me. And standing here at year's end, my sense is that the day has come.

What I did spend more time and energy on this year was finding out what I'm actually good at and actually want to do. In an era where AI is evolving this fast, it feels like most people's work will soon be replaced or transformed by it. Productivity really has gone up, and so what you yourself want matters more. Yes — back to that question of what I want. Maybe only once I've worked that one out can I look forward to the future again.

Thinking back to my plans at the start of the year, not much of it got done; instead I spent every day agonizing over very unspecific questions. Looking back on the past year, I made more attempts, mostly failures, and I seem to have become more lost. I did an enormous amount of metaphysical thinking, and when I tried to talk about it with friends, I'd get batted back with "you just have too much time on your hands." Sometimes I even feel like I've stopped on the social clock — watching the people around me move forward while I keep agonizing over which road to take, walking a few steps out and returning to where I started.

But I do feel completely different from the me of last year. I don't know whether that's good or bad, but at this particular point I'm genuinely a little curious about which road fate is going to lead me down.

I listened to a lot of K-pop this year and drew a lot of energy from it, but the biggest impact actually came from Of Human Bondage. So the thirteen-year habit of closing a year-end review with a song has, this year, been swapped at the last minute for a book.

Reading it, I was deeply puzzled: why, after thinking so much and experiencing so much, is the protagonist ultimately drawn to ordinary stability? I don't understand it, and I keep finding myself turning the question over.

The passage in it that uses a Persian rug as a metaphor for life is also exquisite:

Thinking of Cronshaw, Philip remembered the Persian rug which he had given him, telling him that it offered an answer to the question of life's meaning. Suddenly the answer occurred to him, and he chuckled. It was like a riddle you puzzle over endlessly — and once the answer is out, you wonder how you ever missed it. The answer is obvious: life has no meaning… It is like a weaver elaborating his pattern for no purpose but the pleasure of his aesthetic sense. A life can be lived the way that weaver works — or, if a man is forced to believe his acts are not of his own choosing, he can look at his life the same way: as nothing more than a pattern.

— Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

Right — life has no meaning set in advance; a person's choices and experiences weave the whole pattern of it together. Letting go of the fixation, accepting that the world and I both change, may itself be a new way of living.

To my 2025, my twenty-ninth year.