2025: A Wheel of Life Assessment, Flip of Optimism, & General Long-Termism
Traditionally, I wasn’t much of a New Year’s resolutions guy. Nor much of a “how has this year been” reflecting-type either. January 1st is an arbitrary date chosen to start a calendar year. One could just as well introspect about the past 365 days or initiate a resolution on, say, 29th Aug, and it shouldn’t make a difference.
But, it does.
And 31st Dec/1st Jan works great, at least in terms of neatly bookending events occurring in a given year.
Last year, inspired by a practice that The Missus has been a regular with, I wrote a letter to my future self. You can write to yourself from here (https://www.futureme.org/). It allows for different durations, or you can choose a custom date, and it’ll come to your inbox at the end of it. Consider.
I also had second thoughts and some mild reservations about ‘publicly’ introspecting on the year that was, or the plans/hopes for the year that would be. Mostly because I am still finding my voice and am not sure if it is a good idea to write about my personal year here. And, there was another topic that I’d been playing with in my head for the past couple of weeks.
But let’s push aside what I originally intended to write, and get on this bus instead. There’s also hope that this becomes a regular annual post.
I’ve been visiting my therapist for a little over a year now, and she gave a nice structure to look at the year that went by — “Wheel of Life” Assessment. While her original nudge was to look at these parameters and whether I worked on them or not, I am going a bit deeper than that.
Wheel of Life Assessment
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| Image generated using Google Gemini |
Health:
I was regular with exercising; on most weeks, I was able to exercise either 3 or 4 days/week. I also averaged about 11,850 steps/day for the year and crossed 10,000+ steps for probably 290+ days of the year. I could see some positive effects of this. Hope to continue more of this into 2026.
I’ve been tracking a few key health markers (lipid, cardiac risk, inflammation, liver, kidney, key vitamins & minerals, among others) through half-yearly tests. Most parameters remain in the healthy range and have generally shown improvement on the few that were not.
I continued cycling and became a bit more regular (as much as Delhi’s weather reasonably allows!); got my father-in-law (who shifted near us in Delhi) as a regular(ish) cycling partner for weekly 10-15km rides. Would want to continue this, but was able to do fewer longer trips (~35-50kms) this year than last year. That’s definitely something I’d aim to improve.
Aimed to reduce about 7-9 kgs in weight at the beginning of the year, but ended it at about 4 kgs higher (I just returned from a holiday!). I’ve not been as diligent with calorie-counting as I’ve been with step-counting and hope to be more intentional around this.
2025 started on a 3+ month non-smoking trend. Broke that streak and was pretty bad with tobacco. There were days/weeks/months when I was smoking regularly (for what it’s worth, far less than what I used to). Even a single cigarette is one too many. This was the most disappointing aspect of an otherwise pleasing front. But, I am hopeful!
Wealth:
Had reasonable finances. As is the case with this — could’ve been more, but that’s a wish more than a complaint. Fortunately, no major setbacks, and there was some minor windfall. I continue as a passive investor in index funds through systematic investment plans. Hoped to invest in a few foreign indices, but didn’t.
Work & Career:
Without getting into specifics on this, I am classifying this along two different streams (both unrelated to each other) and terming them as ‘Explore stream’ and ‘Exploit stream’. I was aiming for higher impact (or output/results) with the latter. For Explore Stream, I was aiming for higher intentioned effort.
Exploit Stream: The results on this stream last year were pretty good. But, despite roughly similar efforts, the results on the same stream against the same benchmarks were pretty abysmal this year.
Not to make excuses, but a good reminder that the output is a function of effort, but has high levels of ‘randomness’ (or factors beyond my control) impacting the output. The reminder is reasonably generalisable beyond this specific stream, and good to ground on the fortuitous impact of luck, randomness, or things beyond one’s control (and this could be in either direction). I did course correct by increasing efforts, but that didn’t swing things much in my favour.
Explore Stream: This was an important stream where I wanted certain results. But, quite honestly, I didn’t put enough high-intentioned effort. I did put a certain level of basic effort, but if anything had happened on this front, it would’ve been down to plain good luck. I definitely intend to correct this.
Relationship: Personal; Professional
Personal
This was a better year than the last, with The Missus. Both of us were together through the year. And, both of us were grateful for each other’s presence and company. On most occasions.
I worked on improving my relationship with my dad. It’s a complicated relationship that I can invest far more patience in than I currently do. But, I did far more than the base level of last year. I can do far better.
My other key relationships — with my elder brother and friends — were stable and fine. I made a trip to the Kumbh Mela with a friend and travelled to Bali to meet another old and close friend who I’d not been in touch with for a while, but got in touch and met up because he was in some emotional distress. We’ve been in touch since, and I hope I’ve helped a bit.
Became a part of a large (~120 members) community of seriously inspiring, interesting, and curious individuals. More on that in the final section of this post.
Professional
Had largely positive relations with most colleagues, but for a few exceptions. Got ghosted by a few (clients), which was a bit disappointing. Happily had very, very minimal interactions with a couple of particularly toxic colleagues.
Massive positive: I had a year of very limited general politicking at the workplace. That, in turn, helped with keeping a massive positive mindset at work. The brain wasn’t stewing in negative or stressful thoughts around how to kick someone down or how to keep someone else out. Nor was I playing pointless ‘status games’ at work. It’s surprising how the lack of these negatives was such a massive positive.
Personal Growth: Habits, Learnings, Hobbies
Habits & Hobbies:
Massively proud and happy with my regularity in maintaining this substack. This was one of the positive personal highlights. Have written 16 posts in the 7 months since Jun ‘25, with the largest gap between any two posts being of slightly more than a month. I am happy with both the regularity and quality, and look forward to sitting down to write.
Took up lawn tennis with The Missus. We were intermittent and dropped off after shifting houses around mid-year. Hope to restart that.
Had picked up Python programming towards the end of last year and continued for a bit at the beginning of this year. Dropped off on that, too. Hope to either get back in it or pick a few DIY projects (building a DIY AQI monitor as described by Ayush Patnaik here in the LEAP Blog is high on that list).
Learnings:
Had taken up a course by podcaster par excellence, Amit Varma and economist and general all-round genius Ajay Shah: Life Lessons. Their 128 excellent YouTube videos as part of ‘Everything is Everything’ had so much to teach us, too. But more on the life lessons course in a separate dedicated section.
Spirituality
I am an atheist and don’t see any move towards traditional organised religion, though I continue to see in a positive light the philosophical underpinnings of Hinduism and Buddhism and am fascinated with them. There have been mild thoughts towards self-identifying as a ‘cultural Hindu’ instead of as an atheist, but that remains under-formed.
There’s also been a mild desire (with no action) towards meditation. It remains a weak desire that I know I may randomly take up sometime in future, but don’t have an immediate or specific desire to act on, in the immediate here and now.
Contribution to Society
Does my general presence count as one? :P
On a slightly more serious note, I have a strong positive belief in capitalism and markets. And that belief also extends to adding positive value to society through the capitalistic enterprise (if a customer is willing to pay you, you’re adding value to the customer’s life). And that’s something with writing here, too, where the reader is paying with their time. In my head, that’s my contribution to society.
By a more traditional meaning of it — of contributing through time, money, or effort as part of philanthropy or, say, an open-source community or as part of civil society towards a common objective — there has not been any, nor was there any particular keen, intentioned thought on my part towards doing that (except blood donation around my mother’s birth and death anniversary). And that’s something I am mostly okay with. At least for now. Though I do see the allure of it: we humans do derive meaning and happiness through social connections and contributing to ‘something larger than us’.
Life Lessons Community & Goa ‘Unconference’
I mentioned earlier, in a couple of instances, about having taken up the Life Lessons course by Amit Varma and Ajay Shah. That was in Apr-May ‘25, and while there were many modules with great actionable learnings (around personal finance, personal health, communication, knowing our hardwiring, economics thinking, probabilistic thinking, etc.) it also flipped a switch within me.
There’s a high chance that the work towards extending human life would lead to our lifetimes with healthy and functional brains and bodies to age 120.
We should engage in far more long-term thinking around the projects that we take up, and not necessarily limit it to the ‘traditional’ thought of working till 60 and thinking of another 20 years of life beyond that.
Positive-sum thinking and a repeat-games/collaborative mindset (instead of zero-sum thinking and a one-off games/competitive mindset) towards activities, interactions, and relationships.
As a result of these, there’s a switch that’s flipped in terms of a far more optimistic outlook towards life in general. I also try to be more present in the here-and-now, with a more emotionally expressive presence instead of a cool-guy “yeah, okay, that’s cool, dude” approach to things.
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There was also a 2-day meet-up organised in Oct ‘25 in Goa, where I met with other fellow course participants. And, my god, such an inspiring group of people with distinct personalities, keen hobbies and interests. It was organised as an ‘unconference’ of sorts, and every room or group that I was part of had such cool discussions with people talking about their interests and what they were working on or looking forward to, or just their way of making sense of the world. I was simultaneously having a sense of fear-of-missing-out about other rooms, while enjoying the here-and-now.
I’ll remember 2025 for this sense of optimism that I got this year. And, I hope to retain that for life and not just 2026.
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