Time seems to pass by exponentially faster the longer I am alive. I remember being a bored 5 year old child thinking about how long a whole month was during the school holidays. As a software engineer in a mid-sized company, I now find myself experiencing life through 2-week sprints. It is shockingly easy to lose track of life passing me by now without stopping to smell the roses.

2025 turned into a year of exploration - I spent less time climbing due to injuries, and forced myself to find a new love in hiking. This was in part due to my refusal to let my happiness be determined by a single point of failure, but also due to my love for mini adventures and nature. I also took up gymming so I could come back to climbing stronger, and detested myself for it.

I wondered how I actually spent my time through the year as an adult, so I decided to track my life for an entire year (spoiler: it did not work out super well). This was also an opportunity for me to reflect on the days I had. In late-2024, I created a simple form using v0 by Vercel, hosted it up with Vercel, hooked it up with a MongoDB collection, and subsequently spent many hours of my year inputting information about my day. I then used python to process the data and D3.js to plot out some graphs. Here are some of the results:

Reflections

I still have some data that I have yet to process... will probably try to think of interesting ways to present them before updating this post.

You may have noticed that the data tapered off sometime in September. I had gotten the flu, then the stomach flu, headed for Everest Base Camp right after, got caught in a snowstorm disaster, then came back right to another round of mysterious illness that I attribute to general exhaustion and also the unfavourable conditions I faced in my hike while still not fully recovered. Although I really wanted to see this through to the end, especially since I was so close, the month-long torment on my mind and body was a little too much for me to handle. It was getting pretty exhausting filling up the form every day as well, and I just couldn't bring myself to sit down for a full day to backfill all the entries I couldn't enter for the past 4 weeks. But this was fun while it lasted :) I do remember having a ton of fun in December, what with the company parties, holiday mood at work, and planning a random trip to JB spurred by my boredness (that somehow went out of control...) so the averages probably would have shot up if I had seen this through to the end.

I particularly enjoyed looking through my word cloud, and the curation of words tickles me and brings me back to joyful moments of the year. Its also nice to see the names of my friends (actually mostly colleagues) appear and how big they are relative to others.

My day rating for the entire year came out to be a 6.337. Not sure what to make of this number, but the numbers that interested me most were the ones where I rated my day a 0 or 10. There was surprisingly a handful of extremes and I am heartened to see that there were significantly more perfect days than crap days. When I created this I did not expect to see any perfect days at all. I went through the entries for those days and felt like I was transported back in time - I remember how I felt clear as day and I am thankful to have these records. I think there were some days in December that I would have also rated as a 10. Perhaps I should start recording down every perfect day I can remember as a reminder that things always get better.