Annual Mopey Birthday Post 2025

Reporting live from Hong Kong, which makes this the earliest one yet due to the time zone

And though we be on the far side of the world, this ship is our home.

The annual mopey birthday post is the annual post where I let myself be unrestrictedly mopey¹ and just write about the year with basically no filters².

I should start with the elephant in the room, which is that there’s an order of magnitude or two more people here than there were last time I wrote one of these. This makes it a bit awkward to write something so personal, or would if I were a shyer person. As it is… To both those of you who subscribed because we were already friends, and those who just subscribed because I seemed interesting, thank you for being here. And for anyone who wants to transition from the second to the first, do reach out.

Elephant aside, there’s also a cat in the room, in a very literal sense, who is distracting me from writing anything by meowing at me to come play with him. This also makes it very hard to mope.

This is Honey. He is not relevant to this post in any way, but I mean, look how adorable he is.

Anyway, without further ado, it is time to talk about my year.

The top line is that it was, in the end, a good year. I may not have gotten literally every dream achieved, but I did manage my stated goals for the year, which is more than most people manage most years.

There was a long time when it seemed like I wouldn’t. I went through a lot of bad job interviews, where I knew I was smart or good enough but something just didn’t click - Either I messed up a single interview round because I just went down the wrong solution path, or I just didn’t vibe right with my interviewer, or everything went great but they never called me back (presumably because they went with an earlier candidate or ended up not having another slot on the team or something). But when it happens a few times in a row, you start wondering if maybe it’s not bad luck, it’s just you - as the saying goes, once is misfortune, three or more times is you being dumb.

But as it turned out it actually was misfortune³. Once I decided to accept that things were tough and go on anyways, I suddenly got offers at all three of the places I interviewed at and ended up with the opposite problem of having to figure out which of the very nice and generous job offers I was going to have to let down. Which is a better problem to have, in fairness. And now I’m starting an exciting new job soon, and the next year (however it ends up going) will be unexpected and full of new adventures, possibly in weird new places and almost certainly involving weird new things to do. So I’m pretty excited about that part.

There’s a thing here about persistence. Like Kelsier or Kaladin, seeing things seem hopeless and deciding to go on anyway⁴. And if you just keep getting up and trying again , long after it seems like you should have just given up, you end up making it work.
This worked out for me in terms of jobs. Next up is to make it work with my love life.

But back to reflections.

I had a breakup this year.
Well, this isn’t actually true. Officially we broke up the year before, then went on in an undefined vaguely relationship-y status for over a year after that. But this year is where things fell apart in practice and we actually decided to stop talking. So while it was a long time coming (and we always knew it would come; we had too many differences to ever believe it would last, even from the start), this is the year that felt real.

I used to be confused by people having antipathy towards their exes. Surely, I thought, even if you broke up - which is understandable, many relationships just aren’t quite right - you’d still have affection towards someone you used to like and care about so much?

I think I understand that better now. There’s a thing where, when things aren’t quite right, you start chafing. The pieces of you that don’t quite get along rise up and wear down the pieces that do, until it feels like there’s nothing left of those, until all you remember is your disagreements and your strife. Until you mostly feel ire and resentment, because you’ve used up all the warmth and friendship to try to hold up the rest of the relationship in the face of all the conflict, and the conflict won out and wore out all the warmth. Until you can’t let yourself feel any warmth anymore, because you know it wouldn’t be met with warmth on the other side and you don’t want to be disappointed again. Until you give up on it and let yourself feel distant.

I’m tempted to be maximally charitable here, to talk about how I made my share of mistakes, but it’s important for me to accept that in the end, this wasn’t actually my fault. Part of this genuinely wasn’t anyone’s fault - we just weren’t quite right for each other, which ended up winning out - but part of this really was her fault. I’m not going to badmouth her online here, so I’ll settle for saying she was someone who couldn’t imagine wanting kids, which was both an issue for me in itself and actually pretty indicative of some deep reasons we couldn’t work it out long term, and ones I think she was fundamentally wrong about.

But still, sometimes I remember her smiling because she was genuinely happy, and it does make me smile a bit. For all the problems, she really did have her bright sides.

Moving on.

I’m writing this from Hong Kong, which is one of those places I’ve wanted to properly visit for so long and finally had the chance to actually take my time and do properly. I’ll write a proper city review about it next week, but for now I’ll just note this city is bizarre and alien and I am weirdly happy to be here (though I have had a rough couple of weeks for reasons that mostly have nothing to do with Hong Kong). Last year’s annual birthday post noted I hadn’t been properly happy in months; This year I can think of at least two genuinely happy times in the past week (one is hiking in the mountains here with some new friends last weekend; the other was going swing dancing downtown yesterday. Both just worked the way they’re supposed to, with delight in moving with the wind).

On music, I feel like there should be a song of the year. Over the last week, it’s been this one

This is an odd choice. I got weirdly into this band recently because they always seem so genuinely delighted to be singing whatever song they’re covering (and they seem to have a over for every song released between roughly 1980 and 2020). And this song in particular was sung by the people I met on last Sunday’s hike (because I mentioned Jerusalem), which feels auspicious; on the one hand it mentions my old home, but the tune is actually carried by the new people I met going forward, and these are the people I want to be around in my future.

It’s also just a fun song to whistle.

The other song is this one, and it has weirder and more depressing reasons to be the theme of the year

I mentioned having had a breakup earlier. The strangest effect of it was that, once I decided to accept it, it made me feel truly heartbroken. But not about that relationship, but about the one I’d had before it, that didn’t work out due to more complicated reasons I won’t get into here. I ran into the Johnny Cash song on this and it broke my heart for a week straight.

I think it’s that my last relationship damped my feelings (both because it channeled them into it, and because its dynamic wasn’t too big on expressive emotion, which meant I ended up piping my emotions into /dev/null for a couple of years. And once I suddenly stopped, I started feeling things again, and it overwhelmed me for a while.

I guess it still does, a little, now that I’m feeling things again.

When I left my job, people were nice about it. This was a small company where the people you work with are pretty close, so that part was inevitable.
What surprised me was how many of them went beyond that. The woman who came in to give me a hug when I left. The guy who went out of his way to say he’d liked me personally and not just as a coworker. Both of those were people going beyond social or professional obligations, doing something unexpected, because they had actually cared.

There’s part of me that has a hard time believing anyone would actually care about me. But they did. And it introduced an idea even more foreign to my intuition, which was that they might actually like me and be better off for having me around.
Stated like that, it seems like such and obvious idea. But it’s one that still feels foreign to me. Maybe accepting that can happen is a change I need to go through.

I feel like I should write something about the war, but I won’t. One problem with the war is that it’s all consuming. It takes over your world, makes you evaluate everything through it, makes you think about every friend through the lens of whether he would back you or side with your enemies. I don’t like that. And just like Amit refusing to give cancer a millimeter more of his life than it forced him too, I don’t want to gve the war more of my life than I can avoid.

So I guess that’s it for this year. I found some brilliant new job opportunities, visited new cities I’ve always dreamed of visiting. I kept moving when things seemed hopeless and managed to realize some hopes anyway. I even made some new friends. I got more blog readers than ever before, and managed more professional success at my last job than I reasonably accepted (even if I did end up leaving), and managed to outscore Zvi at the annual prediction contest. It may not have been perfect but it has, on the whole, been a pretty good year for me. If I can keep this up, I think things will end up alright.

Roads go ever ever on, Over rock and under tree. By caves where never sun has shone, but streams that never find the sea. Now far ahead the road has gone…

1. There is a difference between being mopey and wallowing; being mopey means I don’t hold back from saying things just because they' feel bad. It doesn’t mean I wallow in them.

2. This often includes a drink or two. This year that’s soju, because that’s what the local grocery store here in Quarry Bay had.

3. There’s an interesting thing here where if this was a trading strategy that was doing unusually well or poorly for the same period of time, I’d have no trouble accepting that that was just statistical noise - in real life random noise is stronger and more consistent than you think, which is why work so hard at finding methods to cut down the noise when analyzing trading strats - but it’s harder to accept that something is just noise when it’s measuring your own skills in real life and not just a trading strategy.

4. I occasionally have mixed feelings about Brandon Sanderson - especially this year, after being disappointed with Wind and Truth - but one thing he is absolutely sincere and incredibly effective about is writing characters who end up in hopeless situations and go on through pure strength of will. The best case of that is probably his little-remembered debut novel Elantris. The premise there is that the protagonist wakes up as a zombie, and every time he gets injured, can’t die or heal but just eternally feels the pain of it, and gradually accumulates pain and damage over time. And every day he makes the conscious decision to get up and try to keep living despite this. And Sanderson is never as sincere or as intense as when he talks about this mantra of surviving day by day through the pain.