A Fashionably Late 2025 Recap Maybe?

The Unexpected Career Shift

I now work in marketing, specifically as an engineer within marketing, which is something I never thought I’d do. Throughout my college life, I’ve been optimizing towards a product manager career. But then I was like, okay, product management is just a mindset. You apply the same thinking framework to every problem that you see out there, and it doesn’t matter what kind of problems you solve as long as the problems that you solve kind of excite you.

So yeah, working in marketing is pretty interesting. Every day is different. I now run ad campaigns. I write code for marketing campaigns. I play with analytics. I write code to build software for marketing-specific needs. And it’s pretty interesting.

First International Trip

I also took my first international trip this year, traveled to Serbia for a team meetup and ended up making some great friends at a backpacker hostel. https://www.eldiablohostel.com has my heart. Somehow, making friends while traveling in Europe felt easier than traveling in India.

Writing More

This was also the year that I wrote a lot. I think I wrote around ten blogs. I don’t know how many of you read my blogs, but last year I challenged myself to write more. Some of it was technical and some of it was personal, yaay to more writing.

The AI Paradox

I’m depending a lot on AI, both in a good way and a bad way.

This entire blog is now an edited voice transcipt. I haven’t typed any of this. I’ve just been speaking to my computer and it’s transcribing my voice. It’s like a one-person podcast where I just yap!

Secondly, I’ve been using AI to code a lot. I shipped a ton of side projects, and some of them even made some extra money that I could just add to my pocket.

Interestingly, I bought my MacBook in 2024 and I thought I’ll just buy a MacBook Air because I won’t be coding so much, should’ve bought a Macbook Pro. I thought maybe my entire career I’ll just stay as a product manager, just thinking through strategy and maybe laying out plans for those strategies. But the last year I coded a lot!. My GitHub hasn’t been this green for ages, and I’m kind of really satisfied with that.

Depending on AI to code just boosted my productivity a lot. I’ve been building products both SaaS and internal use cases. More to Come! Claude is still my primary driver.

But here’s the fear. I’ve been overly depending on AI for a lot of things, and I really don’t want to do that. I want to work my brain a lot. So something that I’ve been doing on the side is quick math problems to use my brain for arithmetic, at least work it out, fire the neurons, whatever. I still write down thoughts in my notebook. I mostly carry a notebook almost always, unless I forget to.

Something that I’m afraid of for the future would be depending on AI to offload my thoughts. There could be a world where I want to offload some of it, but small things like even picking a gift or planning for travel, I still don’t want to offload those things to AI because I find joy in looking up spots on Google or somewhere and coming up with a travel plan of my own on places I want to visit. It’s mostly the joy in the process of doing that, compared to achieving the task. I still find joy in those meaningless chores that most people would want to offload to AI.

Reading Less (Unfortunately)

Unfortunately, I read less this year, which I’m not a fan of. I want to read more. I have this particular interest now towards political science and economics. I want to learn more about how people behave, what makes people behave the way they do. More on the emotional side, not on the how-the-brain-works side. It’s mostly like, okay, why are people forced to behave the way they do because of their past or their experiences.

Plans for This Year…Maybe

Something I’m planning for this year is content creation. I have had friends who’ve been pushing me to make content, video content specifically. I tried it a bunch of times with KPH over the last year. I still haven’t found a niche that I want to talk about. Should I go entirely technical, or should I just be me, the raw, geeky version of me? I’m just thinking out loud on what to do there. No immediate plans, but maybe I’ll start sometime this year.

I haven’t prioritized my health over the last few years because I was constantly in a mode of hustling. The only goal was to make more money so that I could settle most of my family’s debt.

Which I have closed, All of my family’s debt.

So 2025 is the year that my net worth became positive in a way. Sharing a small win :)

I don’t really buy into the whole “new year, new me” idea, there was a time that I used to, but not anymore.

The Earth never returns to the same place in the galaxy, so time isn’t truly cyclical, it’s a constant forward motion. This isn’t a fresh start. It’s just another step in the direction of the person I’m trying to become

Would the 2019 or maybe 2017 version of me be proud of where I am right now? Yes.

Is the 2026 January 4th version of me proud of where I am right now? I think I can do a lot better. Probably the curse of being overly ambitious.

Gratitude

But there are a lot of things that I’m grateful for. As I talk about every year, I’m grateful for the friends that I have.

You guys, if you’re reading this, I honestly appreciate the time and effort that you take out for me and even to check upon me. Even though I can be a shitty person to deal with sometimes. Even though I’m not that proactive initiating messages or meetups. Thank you for calling me, texting me, sending me random reels. It means a lot. It means a lot that you actually take the time to think of me.

Looking Ahead

So I’ll be 27 this year in May. I still don’t have my life figured out.

I see a lot of people settling down. I see a lot of people traveling. I see a lot of people going for higher studies. I still don’t know if I’m even at a stage where I have the liberty to choose a any of these, because there are a lot of things that I think I should do before committing to any of those choices.

The only focus is to be a better person than what I was yesterday, just small focused micro improvements that’ll compound over time! That’s it.