Happy new year, folks! This is a slightly all-over-the-place article covering very different and unfiltered brain dumps. Few reasons for that:

  1. My blog was defunct since mid November. It was accessible to the world, but I wasn’t able to write on it due to platform changes.
  2. Over the past 6 months, time seems to have accelerated with many life changes, and I was happy to be focussing on them instead of staring into my computer all day.
  3. It is past midnight, I just fixed the TLS issue on WordPress admin and my brain wants me to sleep.

I remember when I turned 27. I was transitioning from my old job to a new job, old flat to a new flat and just in general many life changes. What I do remember is thinking that I’ve officially entered my late 20s. Having spent 7 years in Berlin, would it be fair to think similarly — that I’ve spent a better part of the last decade of my life in this city? Perhaps.

Over the last year, I often found myself at social gatherings where I was the one of the senior-most Berliner. Most people around me seemed have arrived in the city after me, and asked me for tips on life-as-an-immigrant administrative chores. It is a funny feeling, a mental conflict of sorts, as I don’t believe I’ve been here that long or know much, for that matter, although I can get around without navigation and speak basic German, which is a little bragging right in itself.

Perhaps this is a good metaphor for how aging in life feels like. Someday, you’re 20 and look at all those old 30 year olds who’ve figured it all out, don’t understand the internet humor and probably hate their job.

And then suddenly, you’re 30, and it doesn’t feel all that different. Sure, staying awake all night is a challenge and the hangovers hit harder, but on the whole, not a lot more has been “figured out”. The sense of urgency, of being perpetually late to one or the other life milestone, of not having achieved enough and so on keeps looming around. There are distractions, of course, but on the whole, life doesn’t automatically fall into place just because enough time has passed.

It might actually be the opposite. If you don’t intentionally make decisiosn about your life every day, month and year that you live, things keep slipping more and more into a void of indifference, chaos or just a general lack of control over a growing number of things around you. Not making a decision isn’t an option. It is just a question of who makes those decisions, if it is you or the environment around you.

But I digress.

“Better part of a decade” is a long time in a person’s life. In an ephemeral city like Berlin where people seem to come and go, it feels like a lifetime. Most of my 20s were spent in this city so you can forgive me for sounding emotional. To be fair, it would have to be spent in some place. Sometimes I forget that part. Time would’ve not stood still had I not moved here. I’d probably be writing a similar article from my bedroom in Bangalore, or Delhi, or even some place in the US had I made some other decisions. What would the life of each of those parallel-universes-me’s look like?

2025 went by like a speeding train. So many once in a life memories were created in this year, and if I was speaking with the 1st Jan 2025 Abhi about what would an ideal 2025 look like, maybe he’d not have been able to predict the kinds of adventures I’d embark on this year. He probably would’ve predicted that I finally get done with some of my long-procastinated life admin things, which I unfortunately didn’t get to in the end.

I think life is like cooking your signature dish. You try to stick to the basics, while making little changes here and there to add some newness and not get bored of it. Some changes are great and become part of the constantly evolving recipie, while others teach you what doesn’t work. You take an L just like you take a W and keep cooking. Keep cooking, I think that’s the important bit. Don’t stop, don’t settle.

Finally, that brings me to 2026. We’re 60ish hours into the new year, and I’m going to use all of the Ws and Ls from the past years to try and be intentional about my life. I remember writing something similar when I turned 24.

At some point, I realized that some regrets are better than others. Regretting your decisions is better than other people’s. Similarly, regretting doing something is often better than the regret of not doing it. You also realize that many problems that you face are actually your choices. You can’t escape problems, but you can choose the ones you’d like to tackle by making conscious choices.

Some lessons are worth repeating. Being kind, telling your loved ones you love them and keeping in touch with them, taking care of your body and health, learning and growing constantly, making the world slightly better place tomorrow with my actions of today. That’s what I’m looking forward to doing in my 2026.

Thank you for reading!