Looking back at 2025

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 14:00:00 +0000

2025 was a crazy year - a good kind of crazy for once.

My daughter was born, and she’s pretty cool. Adjusting to life with an infant wasn’t easy, but we took on the challenge gladly - we lost our firstborn, and we’re grateful for every inconvenience or a sleepless night. But yeah, life won’t ever be the same.

I took a lot of time off work to be with my kiddo, which was great for my mental health. This is the longest I haven’t worked in my adult life, and believe it or not - not working is nice, and I’m hoping I’ve been trying to keep this optimistically detached attitude as I got back to work throughout the year - with mixed success, but it’s nice to know what the north star feels like.

The space to not work opened up room for other things. I got pulled into writing - a lot more than before. This year I published far north of 100,000 words across this and my gaming blog - publishing weekly across both outlets. That’s a thick novel worth of words, and while not everything I wrote was great, I enjoyed having to come up with new topics, having to get my thoughts out on paper, and getting to experiment with various voices as a writer. 4 of my articles got boosted on Medium this year (which I thought was pretty cool), and I had some incredible conversations with folks in email and comment chains. I especially enjoyed jotting down decades worth of unfinished thoughts about games - gaming is a hobby I deeply enjoy.

We’ve done a few international trips - namely to Japan and Vietnam, and enjoyed both. Traveling with an infant was fun and weird, and I’m excited for even more travel next year. I also got to enjoy building different relationships with my parents and my in-laws, since we now primarily engage with them from the lens of having a kid. It’s fun, it’s frustrating, it’s novel.

All of this - alongside many conversations with family and friends - really brought on a philosophical shift. More appreciation for the impermanence of things. Life won’t be simpler than it is today, things will only get more complicated. And that’s fine. I get to appreciate the way life was before, and I get to enjoy the way life is now. More complicated, more messy, much more full of life.

Ruslan Osipov - Retrospectives

Looking back at 2025