Sup, it’s December 30th, 2025, 4:37 AM, and I just started to write this wrap-up blog.
This year felt different, things moved forward, also got heavier.
The tension
I joined Flowith when it was a 6-person team. Now it’s around 40. That kind of growth changes how you work. I went from writing code to mostly keeping things from breaking.
Code itself got weird. Coding agents, automations, black boxes everywhere. More production errors, but they get fixed faster. Development speed is up, so is responsibility. I care less about elegant code and more about whether the system actually survives. The trade-off works, I guess, for now.
My WeChat contacts doubled. More conversations, more group chats, more weak ties. I’m not feeling more social, just more connected in a noisier way.
This leaked into everything else.
The scatter
After the thing in May, I definitely got more time and money to waste.
Traveled a lot. Yunnan, Thailand, Macau, Thailand again, plus countless shorter trips by car and train. Took a lot of pictures, thought maybe put some in the post but you guys must have seen them so nah.
Picked up billiards 🎱 after Yunnan, went from complete (somehow) beginner to clearing tables pretty fast, nice to know I can still get good at new things.
Built a gaming PC recently and I barely have time to use it.
Bought my first watch after years of not wearing one, not an Apple one, surprise, it’s a Casio.
Back home, the old house got torn down. Reconstruction started. Biggest expense my family took on this year, but it feels right. Before the Chinese New Year, the place that raised me will be there again, just renewed.
Gotta say, time and money, nicely wasted!
The broken
Mind’s definitely broken. Haven’t really found my footing since that thing happened. Living alone means I can do whatever the fuck I want, stay up all night? Zero, people, care.
I know, of course I want someone new, been swiping on dating apps for months, but you guys know how that went. Finding the right person is hard. You pick wrong? lifetime regret, you don’t pick? parents nag. Sometimes I really envy my parents’ or grandparents’ generation, love was simple, almost pure.
Body’s broken too. My body’s been keeping track, whether I like it or not.
Weight’s the same (good news?), everything else changed. Neck pain, lower back pain, more frequent now. Wrinkles at my eyes. Hairline maybe retreating. Chronic (慢性) rhinitis (鼻炎) and pharyngitis (咽炎) getting harder to ignore.
I should go to the hospital.
I don’t want to.
Some things are easier to postpone than to face.
The view
The future doesn’t excite me like it used to. It feels conditional now. We’re in a time where everything can change overnight.
We want things to happen, until they don’t benefit us. Then we hope nothing changes at all.
Maybe that’s just growing up.
…
Shit man, 4 AM brain definitely got the mood 👀.