[fig 1] My 2025 Year with ChatGPT

Though I’m more of a Claude person, this image captures me quite well. I’m exploring different hobbies: running, coffee, music, and cooking. At the same time, I’m still deeply focused on my design career — the Figma Token Jar is hilarious to me, it makes me feel like I’m some kind of Figma Wizard.

The Other Part of This Year

However, ChatGPT only gets to see half of my story; the other half was handled with Claude — it’s the hard truth that I felt lost.

Before 2025, I always had a clear “script”: going to college & grad school (I graduated in 2022), finding a job (I started my first job in 2023), finding my love (I got married in 2024).

So… what’s next? The golden “script” ran out, and now I’m just facing blank paper in front of me.

My Response to Being Off Script

Jack of All Trades

So immediately I started exploring different things — hobbies I’d never had the time and opportunity to do when I was still living the script.

I started getting a bit more serious about coffee making, picking up the piano, running, doing pottery, taking courses in art history, and Japanese cooking.

Those hobbies made me really happy, and kept me busy too. I also started to realize that work is not the only accomplishment I can make.

[fig 2] My pottery works in 2025

The Anxiety and the Reflection

But aside from those happy explorations, I couldn’t ignore the turmoils that are swirling in the tech world — the AI hype, the layoffs, the anxiety.

And the way I cope with anxiety is to really examine it: What’s really happening in the world? How does that impact me and the things that I value? What do I really value in this world?

The takeaway? My core values have always been: Love, Family, Health, and Creating value for society. And how do the AI hype and layoffs impact those? Even if I lose my job, I can still have love, family, and health, and I can always find my way into creating value for society, even if that means I’m no longer working as a privileged tech worker.

Start building

So what are the ways I can try to create value beyond employment? That’s when I started my journey of being a builder. In the last 6 months, I became a creator in the Figma community, and I also attended hackathons and made some fun stuff through vibe coding.

• → My Figma community profile with 3K+ users
• → Make it vegan, a Google hackathon project
• → Rest in pixels, a Figma makeathon project

The Takeaway — It’s Okay Being Off Script

My main takeaway for this year: it’s okay to be off script, to not have a solid life plan. Being lost is a part of life. This somehow calls back to an article I wrote 3 years ago: Agile for life management.

And don’t forget that I have my solid life themes: serving god, loving the people around me, taking care of myself, being responsible… those are the things that are non-breakable that will guide me through my entire life journey.

What’s Next? Here Is My New Year Resolution

My 2026 will likely be more explorative. I will continue to explore different areas of interest and connect with people to get different perspectives.

At the same time, I will start more outputs to the world instead of just absorbing information passively: continue to write and output my point of view to the world, ship things that I think will be valuable to this world, even if they are not perfect, and iterate to make things better.

Best wishes for 2026 to be another fruitful and special year.