My 2025
Content Warning
This content is a collection of personal musings and diary entries. It holds no practical utility for the general reader.
Please proceed only if you are genuinely interested in such personal narratives.
Previously, the concept of the year 2025 was nothing more than the raised “Valid Thru” date on the face of a credit card, appearing incredibly distant. Back then, I was only in my early twenties. It wasn’t until I crossed the threshold of 25 that this number leapt off the plastic card and transformed into an urgent reality.
Looking back, compared to 2020, I seem to be trapped in the same cycle of samsara. It has been a long time since I experienced that feeling of “Epiphany”—to put it plainly, that moment when you suddenly realize the person you were in the past was an idiot.
In the second half of 2025, I finally bid farewell to my student life, found a proper job, and had disposable income. I no longer had any excuse to hide in the ivory tower, tinkering and patching things up. At the beginning of the year, I was still burning with anxiety over the framework of my graduation thesis and spring recruitment offers; looking back now, those anxieties that crushed my sleep late at night were actually just a few months ago, yet they feel like a lifetime away.
Fate seems to have been exceptionally kind to me this year, granting me a job with some breathing room. Perhaps the heavens felt that I had more urgent issues to ponder and resolve. Those are the truly hard bones to gnaw on. Although I am like a poor student who habitually skips class, constantly choosing to procrastinate—I always thought that grand and distant things like the meaning of life or the life I desire should be left for careful deliberation in the future, so I dragged it out until now.
Soon, 2025 will also come to an end.
I. “Completion”
To do a simple review of my mental state: I feel that my 2025 was filled with anxiety about “completion”. I lived like an examinee rushing to hand in their paper, desperate to check off every “Completed” box in this world. I was always in a rush to quickly achieve a certain result: be it graduation, employment, or beating a video game.
This mindset sliced my life into two parts: extremely short “highlight moments” and lengthy “garbage time”. This often left me trapped in a fabrication of the future, spending more time worrying about or getting excited over results, even with a hint of obsessive-compulsion. However, those so-called “results” were merely moments that would inevitably arrive, yet I treated them as the entire meaning of life.
This year, I engaged in revenge spending, buying a Switch 2, a PS5, and a mountain of game discs. This should have been a source of joy, yet it became my spiritual torture device. I fell into a kind of “clearance anxiety”, unable to tolerate the existence of unfinished games, as if they were evidence of my laziness or greed. As the saying goes, “Buying comes like a landslide, playing goes like pulling silk” (easy to hoard, slow to consume), yet I didn’t even have the patience to “pull the silk”.
So, I used various methods to deceive myself: checking speedrun guides, skipping side quests, pretending I only needed to experience the “essence”. I even went so far as to hide games I wasn’t interested in, burying my head in the sand and declaring, “I’ve experienced it.” I built a prison for myself. I wasn’t enjoying the games; I was doing “electronic volunteer work”. All I could accumulate was that fake sense of accomplishment after the credits rolled.
This “2x speed playback” attitude toward life spread to every aspect. I bought a guitar, a guqin, dumbbells, yet I was eager for instant success, wanting to fast-forward through the boring practice to reach the result immediately. In the end, I only gradually lost my patience amidst anxious craving.
I don’t know when it started, but I lost the experience of the process. Therefore, one keyword I define for 2026 is—Process. I want to return to the process and no longer wear myself out with results. I want to re-parent my ability to feel the “process”.
II. “Framework”
In 2025, especially in the second half, I was muddling through, searching for some kind of certainty, trying to build a “framework” for life. I’ve consumed a lot of content that says one must find a fulcrum for life, but I always felt that the time after work was so lackluster.
Hiking, cycling, wine tasting, reading... I collected these lifestyle labels like stamps. I thought that as long as I filled my time and arranged my life in perfect order, I would possess a life. But the result was, I still couldn’t feel the joy of the process. I seemed to be constantly pursuing the certainty of the result. I was performing life, not living it.
I wonder, was using these frameworks and topics to fill my spare time fundamentally wrong? Why must I find a definite theme to define my life? Do I really like Pokémon Trading Card Game? Do I really want to collect those blind boxes? Or is it that I just wanted to find some symbolic things to confirm my existence?
My problem isn’t a lack of fresh things intervening, but a need to regain the sensitivity to feel life. What I need is not to “frame” all hobbies and life into an orderly framework.
I considered myself a J-type (Judging in MBTI), but I fell into a superficial misinterpretation of “J”. A true J possesses a judgment as precise as a scalpel, knowing what they want, and then executing it decisively. Whereas I was just like an obsessive-compulsive blogger, obsessed with storage and organization, sorting time into boxes without caring whether the boxes contained jewels or waste paper.
Ironically, in this debate of “form is content”, I prioritized the result but only obtained the form; I ignored the process but ended up trapped in a boring flow. So, I make a small wish for 2026: Do not use these superficial concepts to frame life anymore. To live undefined, to live well, and to live happily. Of course, the most important thing is to find what I truly want, and to know what result is truly certain within my heart.
III. “Relationships”
The first half of this year was probably the period in my life where I wrote the word “Relationship” the most. It’s quite strange; my graduation thesis topic was “Relationships and Social Networks”. This is somewhat comical—I, an extremely introverted person who is bad at managing relationships, spent a huge amount of time studying it, playing with academic jargon. I was like a person who had never seen the sea writing a book on “Ocean Current Theory”.
I used to think that life was vexing because it lacked the medicine of “relationships”, especially intimate relationships. But reality gave me a resounding slap in the face. Several attempts ended in disappointment, and I was even scammed because of my longing for connection, losing money and overdrawing my trust. This is probably the “remedial course fee” that life charged me.
In the push-and-pull game of interpersonal interaction, I could never catch the right rhythm. When I was passive, I was surrounded by active people; when I summoned the courage to take the initiative, the other party retreated into their shell. This sense of dislocation exhausted me.
Regarding the “relationship” agenda for 2026, I actually dare not set any flags. It remains the biggest cold case of my life. But I’m starting to suspect that perhaps “intimate relationships” are not the antidote to my life; they are merely a withdrawal reaction, a hallucination produced to escape loneliness.
Maybe I haven’t found the answer yet, but at least, I am no longer obsessed with stubbornly trying to solve for an answer within a wrongly phrased question.