The year is 2025 (for the rest of today) and I have just caught up on One Piece. It was grueling and came at great cost to my time, but I think it was worth it. I look forward to the more sane pace of enjoying the new chapters as they come out.
This has been a long year. I was unemployed for 9 months (starting from shortly after writing this years New Years Quests), but I have now been happily, and busily, employed by Linktree for the past ~2 months. I also managed to play on a club Ultimate team for the first time this past summer, which was blast. It also showed me how much I still need to improve to be a competitive player at this level.
Now let’s look at how I did on my quests!
Like last year, I’ll go over the 4 retro questions:
Now let’s see how I did this year and what my action-items are.
I did a fair amount of volunteering (2025 Quest 1) in local politics this year, mostly for the campaign of Seattle’s newly elected Mayor: Katie Wilson. I am glad I was able to chip in and help by doing door-knocking, data-entry, and gathering democracy vouchers at various farmers markets. And it was a real cherry on top to taste the sweet nectar of victory after a nail-biter election night. Yet, it’s difficult to feel like it’s ever enough, given how long the time scales are and how much still needs to be done when it comes to politics. But to have made any effort is infinitely better than rolling over and giving up hope; so I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished and recognize that it is only the first step in a continuing quest for a better world.
My sleep habits have also improved (2025 Quest 7) this year. I think having the structure of a job has helped recently, but as I learned from my self-administered sleep study, my improvements are mostly from self-discipline; noticing the time and choosing to go to sleep even when I don’t want to.
This year I started hosting a few anime viewing parties and invited a friend to join me for some interesting guest lectures at the university (2025 Quest 5). In the future, I’d like to have these events more regularly, perhaps as a standing invite. I’ll need to be more vocal about my plans when I do something, so that people will know about it. And even if it’s not really a cooperative activity, I might be able to get away with calling it co-working.
Lastly, I did improve my calligraphy (2025 Quest 2) and my Ultimate frisbee skills (2025 Quest 3). I hesitate to call them successes, since I didn’t make as much of a concerted effort as I intended to when I wrote the quests, but that’s ok because these are quests; I just need to keep moving in the right direction.
Whenever I write a letter, which I tend to do around once a month to send to my Grandmother, I use my calligraphy pens to write a haiku or something. I’ve built enough muscle memory that I rarely have to go back to my learning booklet to remind myself how to write a specific character (for lowercase anyway, I still have to look up capital letters).
Regarding Ultimate, I feel like I have picked up a few new techniques (like “throw open, go open” and looking for quick return passes first (as opposed to upline)), but mostly from the internet rather than other players on the field (as I had intended in my quest). I often find myself waffling between high levels of motivation to practice Ultimate, and wondering if my time would be better spent learning more about software engineering. Wondering if the cost-benefit analysis is still worth it, as I’ve reached the point of diminishing returns. To advance in this quest, I’ll need to do a little every day.
Through door-knocking volunteering events I did this year, I learned that I get very uncomfortable asking strangers for things. I might be a bit of a socially anxious extrovert; I really like being with friends for basically any amount of time, but once I have to interact with strangers (particularly if I feel like I might bother them) it just feels bad, like when you know you’re doing something wrong. This must be the reason why I hate calling restaurants to ask about their menu.
Unrelated to this year’s quests, I learned that finding a job is basically ONLY possible via networking. Most companies don’t have the resources to interview every random candidate from the internet, knowing someone who can get your application looked at by a real human is critical. I believe there were only 2 companies I got an interview with without a referral (and one of them was Amazon). I am very fortunate that my network pulled through for me, even though I did not manage to grow it very much during my job hunt.
My quest to “be a better partner” (2025 Quest 4) was too open-ended, which made it difficult to know how to make progress. Even for the more general nature of quests (as opposed to goals), I think it would be good to have a more focused direction for future quests.
I also definitely failed to diversify my activities (2025 Quest 6). A major culprit was job hunting, which necessarily took over most of my time this year. Regardless, it is difficult for me to get out of my routine content-consumption-based activities without some kind of catalyst. Even though I made a software tool to help me select activities I want to do, I never used it once all year. Being a CLI tool made it too easy for me to forget. I’m going to need to a more visible interface for the tool, or a reminder to act as the catalyst.
An idea for a catalyst that I came up with in last year’s retro was making my Firefox home page my 2025 quests blog post. Unfortunately this did not help at all because the home page does not show when opening a new tab, it only shows when opening a new window, which I do very rarely. The quarterly calendar reminders I also created were slightly more effective (in that I actually would remember to go look at the quests), but didn’t have a real impact. Perhaps a physical piece of paper would be a more effective reminder?
I’ve realized I don’t really know how to build a work out plan. I’ve done a lot of running and body weight exercises, but I frequently feel like I’m on the brink of overuse injury or something. Maybe I’m not taking enough rest days, or maybe I’m ramping up too fast. Or maybe there isn’t anything wrong at all. I really don’t know and it would be nice if I could find someone who could help me figure it out, because the all-mighty WebMD has failed me on this front. If I’m going to have any chance of being in shape for Ultimate club team tryouts in the Spring, I can’t keep taking multiple months off from running, hoping that that will fix whatever my issue may be.
Here’s some things I will do to act on these learnings:
There’s so much I want to do in 2026! Good thing it’s basically here.