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 a little too easy to lose myself through the monotony of everyday life, even if I fill it up time-to-time with little adventures.

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. Workwise, there were a lot of changes within our working environment, for better or for worse. I found myself getting a little lost into the pressures demanded of my workplace earlier in the year. I think these activities summed up a significant portion of my year.

To see how my life panned out, I tracked 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 indivually. In late-2024, I created a simple form using v0 by Vercel, hosted using Vercel, hooked it up with a MongoDB collection, and subsequently spent many hours of my year inputting information about my day. I used python to process the data and D3.js to plot out some graphs. Here are some of the results:

Reflections

I stopped recording sometime in September. I got the flu, then stomach flu, headed for Everest Base Camp right after, got caught in a snowstorm, then came back to another round of illness that I attribute to exhaustion. Although I really wanted to see this through to the end, especially since I was already 3/4 done, 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 both the joyful and frustrating moments I experienced last year. Its also nice to see the names of my friends (actually mostly colleagues) appear and how they appear relative to others.

I found the lack of table tennis amusing since I spent quite a number of days playing it in the latter half of 2024 after I transferred jobs. I guess this was an indication of the shift in workplace dynamics haha. And although I did try to make 2025 more of a recovery (from climbing) and hiking year, it appears that I did spend a lot of time climbing still, with 1 session per week on average, and surpassing the number of hours spent hiking. If I had continued my entries for the next 4 weeks, I would have added 28 hours of hiking to my records.

My day rating for the entire year came out to be a 6.4. 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 a surprising handful of extremes and I am heartened to see that there were significantly more 'perfect' days than crappy ones. 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 am thankful to have these records to remember them by! 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 experience as a reminder that things always get better.