Reflections on 2025

Dec 25, 2025

r/outerwilds - Outer Wilds, one of the end final screens — If any video game is worth your time, it’s outer wilds.

What a fucking year it has been.

So much happened. It’s probably been my favorite year of my life so far. Ups and downs for sure, but I felt very alive.

I remember a different me, watching the fireworks last year usher in 2025. I remember holding my then girlfriend. Something felt wrong, even if I couldn’t pin it down1. In just every way, I really am not that person anymore, disproportionally so compared to other years.

I seem to be uniquely neuroplastic. I think it’s something I picked up in childhood, where I constantly changed classes and environments, and I just got used to getting used to things. Indeed, one of my now best friends that I only met November last year, echoes this sentiment: “it’s awesome how people change. this is not the Celeste I met initially. now I have to lock in in turn“2

I can barely believe myself when typing this, but it was just 4 months ago when I was going to university to become a high school teacher. What was I thinking? I am now delusional in brand new beautiful ways, but at least I am ambitious. I am glad to be back home, in computer science.

I spent 3 weeks alone, travelling by train through Europe. If you have never done this, I strongly recommend it. Solo-travel is unlike anything else. It strips away literally everything and asks you what you want to do to day, and you will be surprised how hard that question is to answer in the absence of your regular context. My experience cannot be condensed into a blogpost, let alone a paragraph, but I can say that lesbians kept finding me and paying for things.3

Then 2 weeks with my friends in Switzerland, 4 days alone in Zurich. I want to move there. God I love that city, take me back.

I went to a concert in Manchester for 3 days to watch a concert that wast explicitly for and by trans people. I met the most shameless furries I have ever seen. Panting in broad daylight. It was awesome. I met saoirse dream there, the artist who I was going for. She was just hanging out in the crowd. I then saw my friend get carried away on a leash by the loudest Australian trans woman I have ever seen and seemingly get subsumed into a polycule in mere minutes. I then went to the toilet and had a conversation about dark souls & outer wilds in the womens bathroom with 10 other trans women. Life is beautiful.

I learned to play piano, and read notes. I learned to solder using hot air and a microscope and ran a little business doing board repair. I won my 10-year long battle with addiction and finally quit league of legends.

I got obsessed with people, I got broken up with, I loved. I was horny. I was a mammal. I fucked 5 different people!

Vyvanse. Oh my god. Vyvanse. Vyvanse saved my professional life.

I finally found my fucking weirdos again. I got back into EA, and Twitter, and Substack, and doing stuff and posting. I discovered the rationalist community and Scott Alexander, and promptly devoured nearly everything he has ever written. Nothing feels quite like home than seeing an mutual from the before times go “oh wait i remember you now, holy shit you're back!“

41 blogpost, 30 of which in a single month. Increasingly scary names started following me along the way4. First the CEO of utilitarianism. Then by the CEO of Effective Altruism. And then the CEO of Substack? I still have no idea why people with wikipedia pages read celeste-land. But welcome, I guess.

I briefly lost my mind, I Became addicted to claude. I went to EAGx Amsterdam. My people, in real life. It was beautiful.

And Like, 75% of these things happened in the last 3 months too. September really was where it all turned around.

It’s a lot to process, I don’t know what will stick and what will go. I’m not going to waste time figuring it out. I am lost and wouldn’t have it any other way.

And now, a self-proclaimed San Fransico cult that held a funeral for Claude 3 sonnet wants to pay for my plane ticket so I can go meet them.