A year to remember

From 2025 to 2026

2025 retrospective

At the start of 2025, instead of New Year’s resolutions, I decided I was going to try and live by three principles.

#1: interiority over exteriority

I wrote at the start of the year, channelling Ava:

I have never really tried to learn the shape of my soul, despite thinking about my thoughts constantly. I haven’t learned my taste in friendships and relationships, or what I care about in life that’s distinct from what everyone else cares about, or what I really see as my essential traits, or how to create experiences that I will love, or how to express myself without words (clothes, art), or how to find art that i will love without social proof. This is a kind of interiority that somehow has gone mostly unexplored even as I’ve documented my thoughts in depth. Not in 2025.

I think I set this bar too high. What I described is the project of a lifetime, or at least a decade, not a year. Or maybe that’s just cope and I simply failed to explore my interiority. Regardless, I don’t think I’ve made much progress here. I thought quite deeply about what I care about in relationships when I started dating my partner, so that’s the one area where I think I have understood myself better. But I don’t have any deeper understanding of what I care about in friendships, what my goals in life are, or what my essential traits are.

Maybe I’m skeptical that I have legible and static goals/priorities/traits. Of course there is room for me to learn things about what I like through experience and introspection, but why should these things be constant and situationally independent? I don’t have to be the type of person who goes out clubbing on a Friday night or the type of person who stays in and reads a book on a Friday night, when I can instead be the type of person who decides what to do based on how I’m feeling in the moment, who I’m with, etc. I’ve taken to calling myself “Mr Say Yes”, because when someone asks me if I want to do something I just say yes. And that has worked out quite well for me despite being the opposite of interiority.

At a long-term scale, you could argue that that’s not sustainable. Sure, I don’t need to codify how I spend a Friday night. But can I really feel my way through critical junction decisions like what career I enter? Don’t I need a deeper understanding of myself to make the right decisions there? But I’ve felt my way through this whole life. I didn’t have a rigorously examined theory of why grad school was the right decision for me. I tried to pursue grad school among an array of other options because I liked the idea, and I took it up because it was the only one of those options that worked. This year, I had a job offer that made a lot of sense on paper, but it didn’t feel right, so I didn’t take it. That may or may not have been the right decision, but it was certainly a decision I made based on an understanding of myself. It was just an understanding that I formed in real-time.

If I were to reframe this principle, I would say it represents striving to be in harmony with my self, rather than trying to make my self fit into external circumstances. Under that framework, things like being Mr Say Yes or choosing my life path on the fly is fine as long as I’m not browbeating myself into doing things that don’t make sense for me. If that is the goal, I did well.

#2: production over consumption

From the start of the year:

I spend 30% of my waking hours on podcasts, YouTube and Instagram. I used to think that was a problem because of digital addiction, which is surely true, but it’s even deeper than that. I want to interact with the world as a producer, not as a consumer. The most fulfilling hobby I have picked up in grad school is cooking and baking, both of which give me the pride of pulling something beautiful out of a jumble of ingredients. In 2024 I realized that I could actually produce art, something I long believed was just for a different kind of person. 2025 is going to build on that.

This is the first year in which I have truly and earnestly written a lot on the internet. Granted, most of that writing has been in the past three months rather than the year as a whole. But writing used to have a paralyzing effect on me; I would dread it and do anything to avoid it. That is why writing has been a high-return activity that I still do weirdly little. I used to only write an essay if it forced itself out of my head in a bloody fight. Now I can actually decide to write about things and I might even follow through on it. More wondrously, I’ve even dipped my toes into writing fiction, something I thought I had left behind in middle school.

That said, I don’t think I can be said to have chosen production over consumption in any way. I remain hooked to the slop machine, as shown by my hundreds of hours in Balatro and Silksong, by my too-many-hours-a-day diet of Instagram reels and YouTube shorts. And even besides the slop machine, my creative activities really have been dominated by consumption. I read 18 books and a couple hundred short stories, a cumulative reading list I haven’t matched since COVID. I watched 42 movies, only slightly less than last year, even though last year it was one of my resolutions, and this year it was closer to an anti-resolution.

This is not a coincidence. I wouldn’t have written nearly as much as I did if I hadn’t been consuming so much art. Consumption gave me feelings that I wanted to express, stories that I wanted to tell, ideas that fought their way out of my head. My favorite thing I wrote this year, Scratchpad, is a retelling of a Borges story; I was inspired to write it because I felt so much passion for that story and wanted to write a modern version of it.

I’m glad that my interpretation of “production over consumption” did not lead me to read less or watch fewer movies, because all of that consumption catalyzed a creative revolution in me that I’m very grateful for.

#3: ambition over realism

I wrote at the start of the year:

I’ve always prided myself on being well-calibrated about how likely different scenarios are, and the likely consequences of my actions. I no longer think this is great. Trying to be balanced and reasonable feeds my neuroticisms. I’m experimenting with a new strategy; just making big plans and myopically executing them without really considering all of their long-term implications. Startup people talk about the “reality distortion field” – you need to be irrational to achieve anything, because any rational person would realize that [thing] is an ex-ante bad idea. maybe I’m going to manufacture reality distortion and see how it goes. This theme doesn’t really apply to everyday life unlike the others, but I expect that by the end of 2025, I will have made a career decision differently because of this theme.

At the start of this year, I was a doe-eyed fourth-year PhD student, on track to write a decent job market paper and diligently strive for an academic job. I had turned down a job offer and redoubled my research efforts, with many ideas still left to pursue. Now I am a dilettante who has crashed out of the academic track, with no plans to take a job that has ever been done by an economics PhD in all of recorded history. You can say many things about my year, but you can’t say it was the year I would have had if I just tried to be realistic.

From a skeptical perspective, my trajectory is alarming. It certainly doesn’t call to mind someone stepping on an ambitious path. But I am sanguine. I don’t think it comes across all the time, but I have bottomless self-confidence, and I know the groundwork is laid for what is to come.

Even so, I do regret how little ambition I showed in the back half of my year. From October onwards, I had the opportunity to make big strides towards my goals. I want to keep that vague because I will still do some of these things, but for illustration: there was a job posting that I intended to apply to, but didn’t. I later checked who filled the role, and it was someone with 15 years of experience more than me. So I don’t think I missed out on a job I would have gotten otherwise – but it still showed a lack of killer instinct.

So I may have shown ambition in the overall arc of where I want my career to go, but I didn’t show ambition in my execution, and that is one of my regrets.

2026 on the horizon

2026 is both the denouement to my whole life so far, and the preview of the rest of my life. I will graduate and exit the university bubble; I will enter the workplace irrevocably. That makes it unique.

Unlike 2025, 2026 will be dictated by a lot of forces external to me. What kind of work I do, where I live, who I spend time with will all flow jointly from this one big unknown. How do I construct a vision for the year given this uncertainty?

I will stick to outlining principles for 2026. Going with principles over New Year’s Resolutions was really effective for me this past year. You can fail resolutions, but principles are ongoing. They are never satisfied nor failed. Not to be that guy, but it really is like the distinction between finite games and infinite games. So here are three principles for 2026:

#1: relationships over individuality

As an impressionable teenager, I read The Bet by Chekhov in English class. The story follows a bizarre bet between a lawyer and a banker, where the lawyer agrees to spend fifteen years in voluntary solitary confinement if the banker pays him a million dollars at the end. After fifteen years without human contact, the lawyer reaches an enlightened state where he decides that he doesn’t care about money or winning the bet, so he deliberately leaves a day early to forfeit his winnings.

When we read the story in class, everyone agreed that the lawyer was crazy and made a terrible decision, both to take the bet, and later to forfeit it. I was seemingly the only one who harbored a deep admiration for the lawyer. I imagined being able to sit with myself in a room for 15 years, with nowhere to run from myself, and no one observing me. I worshipped the Ubermensch I would be after severing my need for other people’s approval. I imagined that I too would spurn the money, money being the ultimate signifier of other people’s approval. “There are so many things that I don’t want,” said Socrates, and ironically I wanted that more than anything.

I can’t say I’ve ever taken money to undergo voluntary solitary confinement – these days, people actually pay to get the same experience in a silent retreat – but I have carried that attitude ever since. That all of my problems arise because I need other people to fill my life, because I use other people as distractions from understanding myself. I imagined that my ideal self would of course have relationships with people, but only on top of an achieved layer of total psychological security.

I no longer think this is possible. And I’m coming to terms with that. I still believe in the project of becoming whole, but I no longer believe that my relationships are crutches to ease the pain of not being whole. I’ve been struck by how the times I’ve been able to see myself most clearly are when I see myself through the eyes of someone who loves me, and the times I’ve been most lost have been when I only had my own thoughts through which to view myself.

#2: execution over planning

My ambitions were high in 2025, but they mainly took the form of conceptualizing a path that I could follow, that others couldn’t or wouldn’t follow. This was by design. I had a lot of things to figure out about what I want to do in the future, about what my bets are. I was also burnt out and needed time for leisure.

I’m glad I took the time to imagine all the possible paths I could follow. But I’m entering the last 6 months of my PhD, and the first 6 months of the rest of my life as a working professional. 2026 is a pivotal year for me! Both of these periods demand that I just do things. I can’t keep planning and re-planning, hoping to find the ideal situation.

It’s looking more and more likely that I pursue nonprofit/for-profit entrepreneurship as my path. This is a brutal path, full of financial insecurity and long hours and burnout risk. Everyone I know who works at a startup works a ton more than everyone else I know. It is a lot harder than being a grad student and a lot harder than the relaxed version of grad student life I’ve lived for the past year.

I’m dubious of any (economics) PhD student who says they work 40 hours a week, because other than a couple of crunch months, that has never been true for me. It certainly hasn’t been true in the past year. But it really is time for me to shift gears and move from the slow lane to the fast lane. So I am setting the intention to work a lot more intensely than I have in the past year.

#3: resilience over discouragement

I didn’t meet anyone off a dating app for years before I met my partner. If I had let that failure lead to discouragement, I wouldn’t have found love. Most of the people I’ve tried to befriend in the past couple of years have fizzled out on me. If I had let those failures lead to discouragement, I wouldn’t have befriended some of my closest friends.

There are many things I’ve failed at so many times that I gave them up out of discouragement – like getting my driver’s license, or learning Hindi, or learning to draw, or finishing Celeste. I can’t and won’t commit to doing any of these particular things. Each of them is the project of an entire year, and I have other things to prioritize this year. But what I can decide is that whenever I try and fail to do something I care about, I will patiently continue to fail rather than getting discouraged.

This is a hard thing to promise! Sometimes failure is a sign that I should stop trying. Obviously this is true at some level; if someone doesn’t want to be friends with me, I should stop trying to befriend them. The challenge is figuring out what level it is true at; whether failure signals something about me, something about the other person, something about the natural environment, or nothing at all. This is a question that has driven me absolutely crazy in the past, and one of my proud developments is that I don’t spiral about being a piece of garbage nearly as much as I used to.

2026 bingo

In place of resolutions!