reflections, 2025

2025 has come to an end. I am 8500 ft above sea level while I am writing this and being tightly hugged by nature and its peaceful breeze is clearing my brain well enough to dump this year’s reflections here. It is only since last year that I’ve started making my yearly checkpoints public and it has made me think harder and added an unexplainable hidden accountability. So here is the ‘25 edition for the same

In a nutshell this year felt like a gradual culmination of experiences and events for what’s ahead. It felt like I was laying the foundational components in different parts of my life, preparing for a rocket launch in the foreseeable future. While last year was me figuring out life, career, emotions and setting my foot on the ground, this year was me getting comfortable, knowledgeable, confident and patiently checking all the dials before taking off

From “make it work, then make it right” to “make it once, correctly”, the scrappy 0-1 builder in me learned how to build for the 100-1000 audience. You can’t just build a prototype, see usage and iterate on it later when there are million dollar deals which depend on the feature you’re shipping. My career this year revolved around learning how engineering systems work at a ~200M$ revenue company. No matter how much I complain about speed, energy and fun that gets sucked out when you work according to processes and systems - these exist because of a reason. Though I can write a separate post around this, the only thing to document here is how chaos control through systems is something I understood the value of this year. Another thing I learned this year is how everyone working doesn’t have the same perspective, incentive and value towards a decision you want to take (you aren’t in a small startup anymore where everyone’s passion is the company’s vision) and this makes getting alignment a really difficult task. Getting people to believe in something and actually work towards it is a superhuman skill. Nobody talks about it until they’ve had to do it.

Apart from career, there are three more areas of life which constitute my quadrants of happiness - knowledge, health and relationships

Knowledge as an area has been one of the most exciting parts of my life this year. Whether it was learning about how whiskey is distilled in Oban, Scotland or building a desk robot by buying a raspberry pi, servo motors and a camera, this year has intellectually stimulated me a lot. The current technological phase we’re a part of also makes it so easy to learn anything. With newer smarter models at my disposal I don’t think there is anything except agency and curiosity stopping me from doing anything I want to. At the same time, I read about a newer training paradigm, a newer transformer architecture, a smarter humanoid and VLAs everyday and I feel like I’m being left behind. I sometimes feel overwhelmed and excited at the same time because of how rapid the progress of innovation currently is. I try to keep up in my own time, read books, skim through papers, and make my own scrappy builds to understand newer tech but I still feel like I’m not doing enough. This year was very foundational for me as I spent time finally understanding what’s inside the magical blackboxes we call GPT, how software orchestration for robots actually works, and setting the base to dig deeper next year. I want to be in the thick of robotics and AI infrastructure, and I want to start producing instead of just consuming. Planning some decisions in life which would lead to this. I’m glad though about getting my hacker energy back after a slow start to the year and I’m ending it on an all time high which makes it a good win!

I had a love-hate relationship with health this year. It was both disappointing and fruitful. The nicer parts first - I went from setting a yearly goal to “just complete my 10Ks pain free” (had an IT band injury) to completing multiple half marathons and finishing the best one under 2hrs. I didn’t even think I could do it this year and it has been one of the highlight events of the year for sure. Running went from something I tried to stay consistent at, to something I keep pushing my best at. It also became an escape from my chaotic brain and something that gave me consistency and routine. The post run feeling didn’t hurt either lol. Another win, and a secondary effect of all this running, was me being a year free from any kind of tobacco now. From doing a couple of cigarettes a week out of stress or social pressure to cutting it out of my life completely made me feel good about myself. I have consumed a bit of vape this year at a few parties but I’m planning to cut that out completely as well. I anyway came a long way from owning a vape and finishing it every 3 weeks, to having a few drags twice or thrice a year. Looking back, I don’t know why I got myself to consume these toxic substances when they literally have no positive outcome in life. Mentally, I also feel better about coping with losing my brother a year and a half back. The emotions aren’t as intensely heavy and negative as before. I can sometimes look at his photos now, sometimes stand conversations around family when they remember him, but at the same time, even a single memory of ours when I revisit pulls me into a teary, sad spiral. I know it eventually gets numb and I’ve accepted the lack of presence and how it’s going to stay like this. Things hurt less and that’s good. Coming to the disappointments - despite running regularly and completing long distances, I gained 10 fucking kilos this year. I have a shit metabolism and I now get what “80% of fitness is diet” means. I eat junk, I eat sweet food, and I eat a lot. My stress eating habits don’t help either. The weight gain also caused a lot of body dysmorphia as I went from a person who had abs, decently sized muscles and sharp features to someone who has a flabby face and tummy. The endurance improvements of my body meant less when I thought about all this. I want to be strong, functional and fit for longevity and that is my north star metric when it comes to physical fitness, but the body dysmorphia is a social, materialistic thought that takes hold of my brain sometimes. I’ve realised I’ve had a problem with my diet for a lot of years now. This brings me to another loss this year - I’ve become very stressed in life. Negative things affect me more, I’ve become a bit more nitpicky and borderline arrogant. I wasn’t this way before and I know there is a soft, kind side to me which is the reason I’m able to introspect and understand this behavior of mine. I want to be less of this and need to start being more grateful. Though this doc is just reflections and not next steps, most of what I’ve written here is something I want to get better at next year

When it comes to relationships, I have a difficult time maintaining connections. I’ve been really bad with texts and updates, I rarely call my family or close friends, and rely on in person meets where I can actually show my human connection and feelings. It would be easy for me to blame my super hectic lifestyle for it, feeling overwhelmed with texts and social media, or in general having too much on my plate right now. But I also get the value of maintaining touch with people who are important in your life. I’ve been lucky enough to have people who’ve been understanding and generous enough to not break contact with me despite how bad of a friend I am. I want to show how grateful I am to them. The handful of close people I have, I’ve started periodically calling them even just for 5-10 minutes to catch up and ask how they are. Even a small gesture like this has started making a huge difference in the strength of friendship between us. Another area where I feel lucky is the folks I have in Bangalore. Whether it be my low maintenance flatmates or the set of idiots who wake up at 6 AM on Saturdays to go on long runs with me. The lifestyle I live reduces social interaction to only a couple of hours over the weekend where I can get my weekly dose of conversations to keep the extrovert in me satisfied. I’m lucky to have people who value and understand this, while being there to create a positive environment whenever we meet. In relationships, everything else aside, my biggest win this year was falling in love. I intentionally put this part at the bottom because I’m shy and also mildly believe in nazar. From someone who was living in denial, pursuing meaningless connections and telling myself that I will never find someone - to being deeply, madly and passionately in love, this has been the biggest milestone this year and I’m grateful for it. Despite having a life where I sit at my desk 12-13 hours a day, prioritise health in the remaining time, and follow a strict schedule, I found a high value woman who understands me, my life, my aspirations and who’s become a positively contributing pillar in my life. It’s easy because she herself is similar to me in these aspects. She is forward looking in life, ambitious, understands the value of discipline and good health, is kind, beautiful and extremely caring. We clicked the moment we met and became instant best friends before we took it further. From whatever I’ve written about her, you can probably tell how much I value and prioritise the most important relationship of my life

as mentioned before, this year felt foundational. a preparation for exciting times ahead. We stay curious, grateful and ready.