It's been over seven years now of running the Damn Blog - for my friends, my family, my loved ones - but most importantly for myself. The last couple years have been an absolute whirlwind - and no matter how much I tried to make space for it, I never managed to find the energy and time to give a life update in blog form. Matter of fact, I procrastinated my 2024 update until, well, 2026.

But the year has now drawn to a close, and my life has deviated to such a degree from the last update in 2023 (and the previous editions in 22, 21, 20, 19, 18), that I felt it's time to write again, to pick up some of the usual threads and see how the world, and my own world, have changed since.

It's time for (two) years in review. Usual rankings apply:

five+ {100}, five {80}, four {60}, three {50}, two {30}, one/zero {10}

My job

When I started writing in 2018, I put 'my job' as the very first category in my year in review. Ironically, I never explained why in writing - so my thinking is now lost in time, but I can imagine it was about three things I cared about then:

Time. For a typical person, work represents roughly 30% of the time they spend awake. Back when I started working, I was extremely passionate and likely spent more than half my time at work or thinking about work, so it did make sense that this would be the primary category of a year in review.

Growth. For many people (me included), work is where we get challenged the most. There's real problems to solve, with real consequences, and real opportunities for growth. Tangential to this is the feeling of self-realization and self-improvement, which a great job carries on top of the typical benefits such as pay, career advancement etc.

I'm a very different person compared to when I started working a decade ago - a more pleasant, well-rounded, and more effective person - and I have largely my job to thank for it. My job forced me to work with others, let me discover my issues, and allowed me to iterate on the type of person I am and the type of person I want to be.

Passion. "do what you love and you won't have to work a single day in your life". I have been lucky enough to find a job - product management - that I actually do enjoy on a day to day basis. By putting extra passion into it year-in, year-out, I got a career that has been more rewarding, financially and personally, than anything I could have hoped for a decade ago.

For years now, the Year in Review 'job' section has focused on whether my job is a lifelong calling, or a way to pay rent - I think almost a decade in, the answer is clear to me: it's a way to pay rent, but that does not mean I am not passionate about the stuff I do. Being passionate and caring about what you do goes hand in hand, and caring at work has arguably been the one thing that truly turbocharged my career.

This year I was lucky to be able to take a "sabbatical" - two months off, fully paid for by my employer, to think about my life and my career while getting paid to not work. During this time of reflection I met many people - in Tokyo and elsewhere - that answered this question differently. For them, work is a calling, and not a way towards financial independence. They do what they love.

All of these people I met have a few things in common. They are not making significant money from their work, but they are able to live off it. They all have a 'gamble' - be it a remote bookstore, a coffee roastery, a printing press, design consultancy, motorcycle shop, or an arts practice - that I would characterize as "high risk, low reward". All of them are, I would say, significantly more happy and fulfilled than my friends and peers working in a traditional white collar career. Meeting them was enriching and really made me think.

Where does that leave me? Earlier I wrote that 'I enjoy my day to day job', that's true - but I don't love it; not to the extent these people love theirs. The way I went into my career was to optimize for a financially sensible line of work, get real skills I could not get otherwise, and not lose my identity in the process - three things at which I succeeded.

When I picked my job in 2018, I was broke. I used my first salary to pay my rent arrears. Pragmatically speaking, if I had opened a printing press, continued my design consultancy, or started doing black and white fine art - I would have lasted about 30 days before getting evicted. Not just that, but I had no obvious skills or talent that would set me apart, nor a network of connections that would have helped in acquiring those skills. To this day, I still don't know what my calling is.

Fast forward almost a decade, and I'm essentially financially independent. I am still quite young, and I feel now is the time to truly answer that question. Over the years, I have discovered many things I love and I'm good at - things I have been steadily placing in the 'hobby' category of my Year in Review.

Is it time to move them to the 'job' section - and leave my actual line of work? I'm not convinced, and I'm frankly quite scared to take the plunge. Compared to the people I met during my sabbatical, my opportunity cost is immense. In my job I enjoy freedom, happiness, growth; I get to meet and collaborate with people - and sometimes friends - just like me. My job gives me comfort and stability in the foreign country I live. Financially, it's made me comfortable - if I keep at it for a few more years, it will make me rich.

But I just can't keep but wonder how it would feel to do something I truly love.

Five damns out of five

{100,100,60,30,50,60} {80}

Friends

Twenty years ago I watched "Into the wild" with my father. One thing that stood out to me is a quote the protagonist wrote in his notebook: "happiness only real when shared".

I wrote in the past how making friends is hard when you're an adult, as friendships need time, repeated interactions, and shared interests. After living in Japan for two+ years, I would add a fourth dimension: language.

For thirty years I have relied on language as my primary means of communication. A conversation is like a symphony that starts slow and progressively builds on shared themes and tones; and friendships are a bit like that.

In 2025, I spent significant time going 'into the wild' to remote places - meeting people for which I might very well be the first non-Japanese in their life. In Japan, my bag of words is still limited, and I find myself unable to express the concepts I want, having to take detours or worse not fully understanding what my counterpart is trying to say; these lapses are like a loud ringtone going off in the middle of a concert hall - they are frustrating and disruptive. It's hard to build a symphony of mutual sharing and understanding.

But every word I learn to read, speak and write is like a little hole in a massive wall. Beyond that wall are culture, society, history, people, connections, friendship - happiness only real when shared, shared on the other side of this massive wall. In 2023 I ignored the wall altogether focusing on what was on my side. In 2024 I first got a feeling there's stuff on the other side - this year I have been chipping away, carving holes - any difficult word I finally memorize, any frustrating ending to a conversation, any sudden 'click' weeks later when I finally realize what someone really wanted to say, a hurtful bash in the structure of this wall that separates me from the country I live in.

Expats in Japan like to rehash concepts like 内・外 (inside/outside) to explain away why years spent in Japan yield no sense of belonging into the culture; they raise points that reek of racism (on both sides) to explain what, in my experience, is simply a communication failure. Whenever I have been able to communicate thanks to a language breakthrough, by communicating visually, or by building a shared understanding in a different way - such as working on common projects or on shared things - I have made friends.

Most people spend their life in one place, mastering one specific style of friendship. I still believe for them it's easiest to share their happiness, and be happy in return. That's not the path my life took: I have now lived in 9 different countries, moved many times more, and made friends in many places.
Japan is by far the hardest place, both in terms of language and in terms of connecting with others. When you do, it's also the most rewarding.

In 2025 I kept most of the friendships I had, and made a few more ones. Most importantly, I can see where to go from here. As my language skills expand, the time required for friendships shrinks, and most importantly - the shared interactions and interests widen. This makes me grow along my friendships, which is more than I could ever ask for. Sooner or later, I'll chip one last hole in that wall and that wall is coming down for good. That day, I believe, is not far away.

Five damns out of five

{50,60,80,60,80,80} {80}

Financials

When I moved from Singapore to Japan, I took a 50% effective pay cut along with a significant reduction in career opportunities - both because Japan's office is smaller, and because there's less competition here and therefore less opportunities to make more by jumping jobs to another company.

I have no regrets.

There's this monologue in "The Gambler" that goes like this:

you get a house, an indestructible Japanese car, you put the rest into the system at 3 to 5 percent to pay your taxes and that's your base, get me? That's your fortress of fu***ng solitude. That puts you, for the rest of your life, at a level of f**k you. Somebody wants you to do something, f**k you. Boss pisses you off - f**k - you.
Own your house. Have a couple bucks in the bank. Don't drink. A wise man's life is based around f**k you.

2025 is the first year I can, if I choose to, immediately retire on that wise man's life. I am not wealthy, and I don't particularly like money. But I have enough saved to build my fortress, if I feel like. Having started my career with a subzero bank account, I'm often amazed that I even got here and I will forever be grateful for the luck and opportunities I got financially, while leading an interesting life that's now also f**k-you-proof.

Five+ damns out of five

{60,100,100,50,100,100} {100}

Love

2025 is the year where many of my friends got engaged, got married, or got a baby. As for me, I got told by some granny in the street I'm very handsome, and that's pretty much my most romantic moment of 2025.

My dating life was pretty good up until the point I moved to Tokyo, but has essentially died in 2025 - and I believe this is due to a combination of factors.

One, is that we've all gotten older - it's not just my friends who're getting engaged and married; it's everyone my age. In Asia there's a strong bias towards 30 as a significant deadline by which people should be settling down, and that means the dating pool in my age range is shrinking rapidly.

Second, is that there are some misalignments between what Japan generally looks for someone to settle down with, and me. I don't have a deep network of friends and acquaintances to vouch for me, I am a foreigner that has moved around a lot (and so more likely to leave again), I am ethnically and culturally not Japanese, and I don't speak fluent Japanese.

So that's the market. But in my line of work I've learned only incompetent product managers blame the market rather than the product - and this Year in Review is a space for introspection - so let's focus on the product here (me), which certainly has a few glaring issues.

First and foremost I have a positioning issue: what and who is this product for? My job, the way I dress and talk, my background and my identity would squarely place me in the "techbro" category - a privileged white male with a big ego and even bigger self-confidence. That was certainly the case when I graduated, but over the years I spent too much time introspecting, travelling and living - and too little time following our oligarch's views on Twitter. As a result I now live in this odd twilight zone where I'm employed at a large public financial technology company, yet I despise what the tech world has become and certainly don't want to be part of it beyond my 9 to 5 - nor date people that conform to these views. This has progressively changed my lifestyle, my sense of humor and my beliefs - all things that people only discover after spending time with me. It's a bit like purchasing an iPhone Pro Max, opening the box and finding a Nokia N900 covered in no-global stickers. Not everyone would appreciate that, certainly when looking for 'a man in finance'.

What about artists, alternative people, activists then? Am I the right fit for them? Even less so, as the art world is extremely nitpicky about who fits and who doesn't, and someone like me who, god forbid, has a stable career and regards things like printing or taking photos as a hobby or a passion rather than (as my artsy dates usually refer to) 'a practice' is not necessarily someone to be excited about.

In a sense, this branding issue: what do I stand for? Most people will tell you their partner is "the funniest man they know", or "feels like my best friend" - those are true feelings, but they simplify a set of more complex calculations about what we are really looking for in a partner: stability, support, happiness, someone who's hot, someone who wants a large dog, someone my parents would approve of, and so on. Everyone has negotiables and non-negotiables on this list - and rightfully so. From the outside I would struggle to qualify which of these boxes I check, myself, as a potential partner; sometimes that becomes extremely important when trying to build a serious relationship.

That's not to say I don't have good traits - on the contrary, this is a branding issue: I am bitingly funny, highly educated, I have lived many lives, which brings good stories and good experiences, I'm kind, I have passions and things I'm good at, I respect others but without being a pushover, I have an open world view and am always ready for discussions and for changing my point of view. It's just that those traits are hard to market compared to more straightforward ones, and I don't have much ability, opportunities, or interest to show these off - I'm a good product in a bland box.

The final problem is an acquisition issue: for over a decade now I have met people to go out with through my hobbies, in school, through work, at parties, through friends, online, you name it. This entire time I was wondering - will there be a time when this steady stream of potential partners will no longer be as effortless or full of as many interesting people? The answer is yes, and that time is now. I'm now at a point in my life where I absolute despise online dating, but I'm also not meeting people organically either - and so the product sits on a shelf, unsold for now, with no interested customers.

Does looking at love as a product help? Maybe - in a sense, it's a way to structure what's essentially a matching problem, understand the issues at hand, and maybe fix them. Some people are more romantic than this, and may object that relationships are often irrational - and maybe they can be for some people.

But for me, I'm really happy with my life, with who I am and with what I do. If I'm going to be with someone, it needs to be someone that will enrich my life - not just fill the time I have with excitement or infatuation. I don't want to be in love; nor do I need to be loved. I want someone that I can be with for years, to build something meaningful together; someone I can understand and that can understand me - and I'm sure this person is out there: I've been with them before. I just need to find them once more.

Zero damns out of five

{10,10,80,30,10,50} {10}

Health

In my 20s I spent no time caring for my body. Little sleep, overwork, long walks, mountains without prep or equipment, no rehab after injuries, no attention to posture or strain. My motto was “drive fast while the car is new.” In hindsight, that was stupid.

I'm now in my early 30s, that abuse—plus lack of sports growing up and probably genetics—has turned into constant pain when standing or walking. My hobbies and lifestyle are based around walking. I live in one of the most walkable countries on earth, with amazing public transport, lots of nature, and lots to explore; but my ability to actually walk though has been declining in the last couple years to the point where some days I just can't move.

I have tried everything to fix this. Orthopedic shoes, inserts, shockwave therapy, cortisone, university hospitals, 3D scans, barefoot shoes, you name it. The only thing that has somewhat worked is a 5 dollars stretching board and balance board from Aliexpress.

Last year I was optimistic still, but this year I'm upset, tired, and just often sad about this. I am conscious these are comparatively small health problems. Many of my loved ones have had issues in the past couple years that are much more debilitating than knee pain. I am still young and generally healthy, and this is manageable suffering.

On the other hand, I am worried at how fast my body has become old, and I wish I could go back in time and change the bad decisions that led to this.

Zero damns out of five

{10,10,10,50,80} {10}

Hobbies

One of the main reasons I left Singapore was the lack of a sense of discovery in my everyday life. In may countries it's easy to buy things, but hard to create things and that filled me with a constant sense of emptiness.

To create things requires a place that lets you discover new ideas and techniques; open and friendly people to learn from or collaborate with; political and economical will to support this kind of endeavors, a tradition of creativity, and interest from the majority of the population to ultimately support this financially. Japan has them all: the country is bursting with opportunities to make things and passionate people to work with - be it as a professional or simply, like me, as a hobby.

In 2025 I made risograph and silk screen prints, took thousands of film pictures, I was able to learn in color and black and white dark rooms, I repaired and built things, read and discovered books, visited exhibitions and fairs, met with hundreds of creative people which led to so many new thoughts that will be mine forever. I am so lucky.

Through my photography I met a large number of new people in 2025. On top of taking the kind of pictures I like, I also started exploring other photographers' works, and spent a lot of time in libraries and museums. I was able to connect with lots of photographers both in Japan and abroad. Most importantly, photography was my bridge with everyday people I meet on the street, and gave me a chance to strike up a conversation, get technical, get a community, and just generally grow as a person.

As my actual job is mostly done digitally, I was also looking for something more practical in my life. In 2025, I started an apprenticeship repairing old mechanical cameras. Once a week, I get to lean into my photography passion from another angle, and learn complex skills from one of the most talented artisans I have ever met - and all of this in Japanese.

Indeed, the last hobby I worked on in 2025 is learning Japanese. In 2023 I wrote "I know about 30% of the symbols it takes to read Wikipedia, which is not nearly enough". In 2025 that number has climbed to 93%. I can read traffic signs and labels at a middle school level, I can do phone calls, I can read comics and I have started buying books again. Most of all, I have started to (roughly) understand conversations, which is the most important milestone in the flywheel of learning.

In my 'friends' section I talked about language as one of the most important elements to connect in Japan. In 2025 I watched the cryptic pictograms of Japanese progressively morph into meaning, opportunities, ideas and directions for me and for others. Language is the way we label the world, and to learn this language has been the best and most important choice I made in 2023.

Five+ damns out of five

{30,80,80,50,80,100} {100}

Places

The 'places' section of the Year in Review has often focused on places I traveled or moved to - but throughout 2024 and 2025 I mostly just stayed in Japan. It's ironic that after looking for two decades for a place to call Home, I found it in a place that has an insular culture, a difficult language, and a hugely homogeneous population that doesn't always take kindly to outsiders.

I never had any ambition to move to Japan. I moved here for one reason, and one reason only - as I eloquently put in 2022: "I'm moving out to Tokyo: a place that is everything that Singapore isn't. Or at least, that's what I hope: like a man running out of a burning building, I haven't really stopped to consider all the variables - all I know is, I need to get out of here."

Tokyo was simply the closest landing after two years in Singapore's cultural wasteland, and now that I have spent more time exploring Asia, I can only say - this is the luckiest thing that's ever happened to me.

Japan's real traditions (not the manga, anime, videogames export) go back for generations, and are incredibly deep. There's enough to explore for years to come, and it will take even longer to master the language and the culture - if I ever can. And the people I have met so far are wonderful humans: they are slow in their interactions, deliberate in their thoughts, yet with a wicked drive and sense of humor that just floors me all the time. Like a stern professor playing hilarious pranks, Japan is a place for both learning and grinning - deeply humbling but highly supportive at once.

In 2023 I applied for permanent residency - a visa that would give me the ability to stay in Japan forever even if I left my job. In October 2025, I got it. This expands the range of things I can do in Japan enormously: I can now buy a house, start a business, go work in a farm or any other job, be unemployed, and generally live whatever life I want, in the place I want.

Freedom.

Five+ damns out of Five

{80,80,10,10,10,100} {100}

Wrapping up

I don't think I could have imagined my life this year back when I started writing the Damn Blog. That's both a worry and a relief at once.

It's a worry, because over time some of the things I took for granted - things like my health, having a romantic partner, or living in places I love - unexpectedly disappeared from my life. Life being unpredictable can be interesting in certain phases of your life, but having entered my thirties I now feel like adventure should take a backseat to building meaningful, intricate, long-term projects. The turbulence my life experiences year-in, year-out (as exemplified by the swinging Damn Graphs under each section) is something I have valued in the past, but it does feel like now is the right time to invest less on discovery and more on doubling down on the many things I already know I enjoy.

On the other hand, that's the relief part. The fact my life has been unpredictable has led me to so many discoveries, to meeting so many interesting people and living in so many wonderful places, that I can actually compare things. I can say, hey - this place fits me better than this other one. Wait, I think me and this person would get along well. Damn, I think this is something worth investing time into.

Three years ago I wrote: "I am not carried by the world changing around me, but I react to it. I'm not floating, I'm swimming.". The ability to do so is not something I was born with - it's something I built over the years by constantly thinking about what I was doing, taking bets, sometimes failing, but always continuing to swim. Like a fish looking for the ocean, I now realize I was in it all along.

So swim on.

As the sixth year of the Damn Blog draws to a close, it's time for yet another Year in Review. I love how predictable this has been, to the point that several people have been asking when this post is coming out. Vox populi!

It's been a crazy six years: I wrote the 2018 and 2019 year in review in Amsterdam, 2020 in Italy, 2021 in Singapore and 2022 in a cafe' in Estonia planning my next move. For 2023, I am sitting in my tiny apartment in Tokyo - where I'm now living - looking back at the year that has been, with the usual ranking:

five+ {100}, five {80}, four {60}, three {50}, two {30}, one/zero {10}

So, how's season six been?

My job

In 2o22 I wrote about taking on a different role and moving to Japan. The move happened for two reasons: first of all, I was struggling with the realities of working in a company that had grown much larger in just three years (we were roughly 5000 at the end of last year, up from 1500 when I joined); second of all I was absolutely miserable living in Singapore and, if I had not moved, I would have quit and returned to Europe.

I'm glad I took the chance on Japan - a country I'd only been in once, and an office I'd never visited. Tokyo is a huge and sprawling place, but my workplace has just a few people and fun to be in; there are no redundancies and the work is much deeper in scope and direct in execution - something I really enjoy.

I have now been working in big fintech for half a decade. I don't think I could have made a better choice given my background: fintech was the most meritocratic sector I could end up in after graduating; a place where good ideas are respected and even people starting out are given the chance to build something big. I met many extraordinary colleagues whom I'm still friends with today, I earned good money, I got to work together with people from all over the world, everywhere in the world. Work was never a chore, and I've had plenty of fun at work every week for years.

But I'm a bit tired now. In 2024, I would like to start a small side business; one that I know has limited monetary rewards, but with the potential to create a community around what I do. More than a job, it would be a lifestyle business; something to represent a potential way out of the tech sector I once loved so much.

I think the Covid years have changed my line of work for the worse. People who started out during this weird time were robbed of opportunities to learn and grow: those with experience and tricks to teach were too busy running the ship through hypergrowth and what seemed like a massive shift in the way we worked, too busy to worry about freshly graduated talking heads on Zoom. Roles in companies have become much more fungible now; having fully commoditized technologies and capital, we're now moving to human optimization.

With AI now a credible alternative, I wonder how entry level jobs will look like in the near future; the path I took looks increasingly more unlikely for young professionals; even more so for graduates in the populous regions of the world whose investment in education might not pan out anymore.

I was lucky that my own investment in education did pay off, if anything - this is a fantastic life and I have a job many people would dream of. Over the past years I've oscillated between work as a calling and work as a means to pay rent and do more interesting things; but I'm veering more and more towards the latter idea. The work I do is fun but there is really not much to it beyond the awesome people I keep meeting along the way. And that, at least, is worth something.

Four damns out of five

{100,100,60,30,50} {60}

Friends

It's a common notion that it's hard to make friends living abroad; I disagree - what is hard is making friends in adulthood. Friendship needs time, repeated interactions, and shared interests; and those three are hard to find when juggling the needs of adult life.

Many of my friends have chosen a place to live and settle down by now; having moved around a lot, for me the focus has always been not just keeping in touch with the people I love, but also meeting new people to learn from and grow with.

Now, the million dollar question: is it hard to meet these people in Japan? Well, the language barrier is obviously a huge one - most Japanese people, even in major metro areas, are not confident about their English, and I'm not able to speak Japanese fluently (yet). Japan also has way less free time than other countries: working hours are long, and people don't have that much time to connect.

But people here strongly identify with their interests, and those interests resonate with the things I love. I have been lucky enough to meet plenty of people through my hobbies - mostly printing, photography, technology and more; contrarily to popular opinion the Japanese have been nothing but welcoming, and have tolerated my horrible attempts at speaking their language, my many ways to disturb the peace, and my often-occurring faux-pas with remarkable patience.

The friends and future friends I met this year are a varied bunch of interesting people, each with their own quirks, brilliance, ideas and each of them has contributed to my life somehow. I was also able to keep in touch and reconnect with many people that I've known for years and decades, in London, in Hong Kong, in Milan or in Melbourne - it felt as if no time had passed.

There's a saying in Japanese: 'one meeting, one life' - basically every moment spent with someone is unrepeatable and therefore as valuable as an entire life. Last year I wrote "a life spent exploring is a life worth living": with the friends I had in 2023, each meeting was a life worth living.

Five damns out of Five

{50,60,80,60,80} {80}

Financials

This year I took a pay cut to move to a different place, and I don't regret it at all. Thinking about money has never made me happy, and even more so now that I have sufficient savings to not have to think about money very often. I am very lucky.

My "f**k-you-money" metric is now measured in years. My lifestyle has not inflated. And Japan is cheap, so this section is short:

Five+ damns out of Five

{60,100,100,50,100} {100}

Love

My 'love' section has always been a rollercoaster, so I guess it will surprise not many that - half a decade in since the start of the blog - I'm single again. In 2023 I fell in love exactly once; just like in 2022 this person is moving to a foreign country, and I'm not willing to follow her - meaning I'll be soon single again in 2024.

Now, despite not being the most handsomest of people (an ex once described me as 'Mister Potato Head, but with lanky legs'), I have been lucky to date people from all kind of backgrounds in the past decade, and I think that's down to a very limited list of desirable qualities: I make people feel comfortable, I try to lead an interesting life, I am decent at introspecting and therefore occasionally funny, and I treat my partners' life and time with as much respect as I treat mine, which is to say a lot.

Yet the years have gone by and most of my friends are by now engaged, married, or in stable relationships; and here I am pondering what weird secret ingredient I'm missing.

Being alone and being lonely is not the same thing: I treasure being alone, with the freedom to reflect about and pursue the things I love. Love does not come with shackles, but relationships often do; and relationships are in a certain sense a negotiation, a search for common ground between 'the things I like' and 'the things you like'; to meet in the middle is to find a compromise that often leaves both parties unsatisfied.

But I do think relationships where everything is shared, yet both parties are whole, do exist: so I will keep searching in 2024 for something like that. Last year I wrote: "the people I'm meeting these days are more bitter, and less hopeful about the future than the people I used to date in my early 20s", and maybe that rings true - but at least I'm not bitter, and I'm still hopeful: in fact, I'm as happy as I've ever been and I can't wait to meet someone again in 2024.

2023 ends with me being single again, with someone I liked leaving again, and with a tinge of disappointment at watching, again, another moment, another person, another life somehow disappear back into the infinite number of unrealized futures. But it also ends with opportunities, with a sense of wonder that was absent last year, and with the knowledge that I learned something from every person I've met so far, including all the ones I've been in love with.

Three damns out of Five

{10,10,80,30,10} {50}

Health

I'm always super careful when I write about my health, because health is relative. I'm in my thirties, and I have not had any major medical disaster weighing on me, despite being out and about all of the time; many of my friends had medical scares this year, but I'm mostly OK.

On the other hand, this is the first year I feel like I'm aging: at the start of the year I had carpal tunnel, then I injured my knee going on a bike ride - took me about a month to recover. I also developed what I suspect to be plantar fasciitis (a fancy term for heel pain) by wearing flat shoes and walking a few thousand kilometers in them - a problem I'm not sure how to solve.

In the end though, just like I wrote last year: "as I get to see my loved ones aging around me, all I can think of is how I must keep taking advantage of my health for as long as I have it"

Five damns out of Five

{10,10,10,50,80} {80}

Hobbies

Last year I wrote that "Singapore eroded my ability to pursue hobbies". I remember, while writing that line, I actually wondered: is it Singapore, or is it me making up excuses?

As it turns out, it was, indeed, Singapore.

My move to Tokyo in 2023 has been an absolute triumph, allowing me to learn and do new things with people that get it; every day was a surprise with just so many opportunities to do stuff that matters to me.

This year I printed lots of stuff, used a darkroom for the first time, I learned about letterpress, zines, and art books; I went to museums, visited camera repairmen, saw moments I never thought think existed in real life and all of that while being surrounded by people with passions, dreams, ideas and talent, working together to actually make things.

This was also my first full year shooting film photography. In 2022 I was proud about my photographs, but 2023 was truly the first year where - for the first time since I picked up a camera, a decade ago - I feel like I'm truly photographing things that matter.

I feel that what I do matters.

In fact, I would love for photography and its ecosystem of brilliant people who truly see life as a collection of beautiful moments, each one unique, to be a bigger part of my life. So far, photography has belonged in the "hobbies" section - but I'd love for it to turn into an additional line of work for me. I love my day job, but I also feel like I have the energy and the ability to create a community around a business idea - an idea which is for now nothing more than a stub, but that can grow if I manage to find the courage to start my own film lab in 2024. Let's see how that goes.

A final note goes to "learning Japanese", which I thought last year would be my only hobby. I was wrong: I did a lot in 2024; but I was also able to put significant time into learning Japanese. I'm several hundred hours in by now, and I'm hooked by the language, as hard as it is. I now know about 30% of the symbols it takes to read Wikipedia Simple, which is not nearly enough, but more than the 0% I knew at the start of the year. I'm also making steady progress on the speaking and understanding part, so that I can finally place phone calls, have a chat with someone new, or find the way when my GPS isn't working, all by myself, in Japanese.

Five+ damns out of Five

{30,80,80,50,80} {100}

Places

Last year I spent most of the 'places' section unpacking the time I spent in Singapore, with 2022 my worst year ever for that category.

I hated where I was; I felt like I had no home and I was just wasting my time. I progressively forgot how it is to love the place you live in, and wondered: "what is it that makes a country a compelling place?"

I think I remember now.

Five+ damns out of Five

{80,80,10,10,10} {100}

Wrapping up

I have been writing my year in review for six years now, and the scope of it has changed quite a bit. The first few years were about rating my life and seeing how to improve it: a Kaizen of sorts. Later reviews were more philosophical and reflected about my place in the world and how I look at it.

All of the reviews were about change - about going somewhere. I wrote about the way I adapted to 'curveballs', the way I felt the world was a large open ocean I was swimming into. We're half a decade in, and the world has been changing around me, repeatedly - to the point that I am starting to wonder whether adaptation is the right attitude - or even possible at all.

New media turning the youngest generation into an enigma, wars big and small going on, the inevitable next pandemic, autocrats getting elected left and right, sabre rattling - these things have happened for as long as recorded history has. The defining events of a generation have always been wars, epidemics, discoveries or radical changes in the way borders are drawn and countries run. And the world keeps turning.

But I think this year two things have happened that have no historical precedent.

Climate change

Climate change finally entered the general public discourse: 2023 was the first year I heard people that I consider completely disconnected from the science world talk about climate change. And for a reason. 2023 was the hottest year on record, ever, but for the first time it was visible - the cherry blossom was earlier than ever, but by winter there was no snow on any of the mountains I know. The autumn leaves forecast in Japan (it's a big deal) had to be revised thrice; in the end autumn leaves only lasted a week; Hong Kong flooded, and so did Europe - yet in Japan there was no rain season this year.

The Paris agreement seeks to limit average temperature change to 1.5 degrees, with a 'hard stop' at 2 degrees - when the agreement was drafted, in 2015, those seemed like good numbers. But in 2023 the 1.5° threshold was breached in March, and the again in June. From July to October, the anomaly line inched higher and higher, rarely dipping below 1.5°. In November, the 2 degree threshold anomaly threshold was breached for the first time in history.

In the Netherlands, where I used to live, the Maeslantkering storm surge barrier closed automatically at the 3 meter threshold for the first time in history just before Christmas. I think what's more interesting is how it closed: with a storm looming, port authority could not take a decision on whether to stop ship traffic and close the barrier, or to keep it open hoping the storm would pass (as it did); in the end it was the computer who decided to shut the doors.

That's a good story because it shows why humans are uniquely unable to deal with slow changes. By now, everyone understands climate change - but I don't think anyone truly understands it. We're somehow convinced that 'it will pass', we're convinced that a magic silver bullet solution will be found that lets us continue living as we did before, in a slightly hotter world. We're focused on keeping the economic kitchen running, because that's what we know how to do - even though the house is collapsing around us. Most importantly, we think that we, as in me, the writer; you, the reader - won't be affected: we think that disaster will be on the news , but never in our backyard.

When I look back at the Covid years, I think it's this last point that is particularly insane: people have forgotten how quickly we went from a 'Wuhan influenza' newsflash in December, from the army taking away our loved ones' remains in a military truck in March. People have forgotten how things were happening on the other side of the world, until they weren't. People have forgotten how we couldn't travel, make plans, and enjoy things for years - wasted years that we'll never get back.

I fear we'll be boiled alive.

Artificial intelligence

For most of history, there was no social mobility. You were born either king or peasant and that was pretty much it. Then came a very short period when everyone could get a better life; the key to doing so was learning new things. People all over the world quickly understood this idea, and education became a core concept of economic development.

Learning things is uniquely human, and it is hard. You piece together everything you know, and build up a precarious card castle of knowledge. Transferring this knowledge is slow, sometimes impossible; and we all start from zero. We are born, we join a school, a job, a dojo, an apprenticeship so that we can learn; we eat s**t for years, until we ultimately become masters ourselves.

So a bunch of us figured it would be much faster if computers could learn instead; the quest for artificial intelligence started alongside the first computers and for half a century had essentially nothing to show for it. By the time I was in university, some promising early applications were showing. I worked on a bunch of state-of-the-art things, which were fun but ultimately felt like a well-tuned bag of tools; no magic, just tricks; I ended up moving to fintech, stopped programming, and never looked back.

This year, ChatGPT4 was released and it has completely upended everything I believed about AI. We are still discussing whether GPTs show emergent behavior or not, but it does not matter: GPT and its peers perform better in real world scenarios than any beginner I have ever seen, including myself. What's absolutely shocking is how they excel at any real world scenario: one minute you can ask it to write poetry, the next minute it's reviewing your code, helping translate Japanese, make a drawing, write a letter to grandma. It has passed the Turing test.

When IBM's Watson beat Jennings at Jeopardy, or Google's AlphaGo Lee Sedol at Go, that felt fair. The largest tech companies of the time threw all of their engineers and all of their computing against a single problem, and managed to unseat the champion. Progress for humanity, fought in a honorable battle; a swordfight duel, man-on-computer, one-on-one.

Compared to that, GPT is a weapon of mass destruction. The global discourse is currently focusing on the fact it improves productivity, and that might very well be true; but higher productivity with equal demand does not mean more output - it means less workers and lower prices. On top of that, GPT does not displace expert jobs (yet), it displace entry level jobs - the jobs we all started in; the jobs that people in the developing parts of the world , or with a less wealthy background, aim for to get a foot in the door of the mobility ladder; those jobs, in short, that are necessary to the flywheel of human learning.

Much like the section on climate change, the thing that makes this unprecedented is the irreversible change that is already happening. We cannot stop the economic engine, which will come to depend more and more on the GPTs much like it does on fossil fuels - to do so would be a country-wide suicide. So we'll keep paying lip service to how AI is a 'new way of learning', which is true - it is the first way of learning that eventually replaces the human.

I don't think AI will launch nukes, or hunt humans with giant robot dogs; long before we have to worry about that, AI will rob us of negotiating power in the job market, of purchasing power on the economic stage, and most importantly, of the sense of wonder that comes from learning things, ourselves, day by day - the one thing that makes us human.

In the words of Ken Jennings, recorded in 2013 after he lost to IBM:

I'm not an economist myself. All I know is how it felt to be the guy put out of work. And it was friggin' demoralizing. It was terrible.
And it made me think, what does this mean, if we're going to be able to start outsourcing, not just lower unimportant brain functions. Wwhat happens when computers are now better at knowing and remembering stuff than we are? Are we as a culture going to start to value knowledge less?
As somebody who has always believed in the importance of the stuff that we know, this was a terrifying idea to me.

It's even more terrifying now that outsourcing is here - no longer a thought exercise, but the reality we live in.

But let's end on a good note, for this was a good year. I'm in a good place. I'm far out at sea, and from here I can see storms coming - but my boat feels cozy at the moment; something I needed. After two turbulent years, everything is well.

I feel like I might finally have found a place, in Japan, where I can be, for a long time, to learn new things and watch the future unfold while enjoying every day. I am grateful for my friends, my family, and everyone I've met, known and learned from this year. I am proud of what I did at work, and even prouder of what I did in my own time.

Ken Jennings ended his interview by telling people to never stop learning - for that's the one thing that will let us thrive in uncertain times. That advice might stop working in the future, but for now it has carried me where I am. So here's a toast to all the learnings of 2023, and to the ones that will be in the years to come.

I just can't wait to see what's next.

It's crazy to think this year marks the fifth anniversary of the Damn blog existing. And tradition calls for me putting my thoughts together for my fifth annual review - that of 2022 - after doing so in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021.

In fact, it's been long enough I can now track the evolution of the different categories across half a decade - and how this year stacks against the previous one with a simple scale:

five+ ▓ , five █ , four ▇ , three ▅ , two ▂ , one/zero ▁

So, what happened this year?

My job

Last year I was feeling quite ambivalent about my job. "It is the primary catalyst towards changing my world view", I wrote in 2021, "but it doesn't seem to have a higher purpose".

In hindsight, what I was experiencing is classic post-pandemic detachment towards my workplace, which I think is a function of three factors; a perceived lack of purpose, lack of interaction, lack of growth.

To unpack this further, we need to consider how my job was at a significantly higher seniority level in 2021 than in the preceding years; and at a company that managed to keep the stakes - and expectations - much higher than Adyen did in 2018-2020. In addition to this, I onboarded during covid and then moved to Singapore amidst full lockdown, meaning I didn't in fact meet any colleagues in person until late 2021, when I wrote my last 'year in review'.

If there's one thing to be learned there: at a senior level, remote working can be quite alienating.

In the first half of 2022, I went back to the office - in person - pretty much every day. I also significantly grew my team, started a new one, shipped several products, and managed to build out a reputation as someone who builds meaningful things. My team truly bonded and become one of the best teams in the entire company (it's a pretty large one); no one is leaving, everyone is growing, and everybody loves their job - which is extremely significant since we try to separate professional and personal life, meaning there's no fancy team dinners or feelings of 'we are a big family' to compensate for shit work. It's just that the work is meaningful, and good. And for a while, everything was well.

In the second half of 2022, I was hit by an unexpected setback at work that took some time to resolve. During this time, I got a bit stuck - I struggled to get recognition for my efforts, and generally felt like my career slowed down unfairly. Luckily by the end of the year all clouds had dissipated, and I was able to get back to full speed.

Instead of cashing my goodwill and results towards a promotion, however, I have decided to take a step down and a pay cut, and move to another role that is more challenging and interesting for me. This also means I'll be relocating again for work, this time to Japan.

I am worried and excited at once - this is the biggest gamble I've taken work-wise and I truly hope it pays off the way I planned for.

A turbulent year, but with a decent ending.

Three damns out of five

▓▓▇▂ ▅

Friends

In 2021 I wrote: "the people I meet are diverse, and interesting". This year I can separate the people I met in two groups: the ones I met in Singapore, and the ones I met while travelling.

Wherever I travelled in 2022, I met people that were caring, creative, nimble, and smart. This is a side effects of my hobbies and of my work, I feel, but also of the fact that I tend to attract a certain type of people because of my lifestyle and how I choose to spend my time.

On the other hand, the people I've met in Singapore are those that tolerate or even love living in a country that is structurally stacked against self-discovery. As a result, the people I met are not just unable to challenge life, but even uninterested in everything life has to offer - in a way that makes me think of Tolkien's Hobbits, or Foster Wallace's "what is water?".

For readers - including future me - that think I might be unfairly characterising an entire slice of the world, I have two notes: one, I'm talking about people I met in Singapore, regardless of whether they're Singaporeans or expatriates, and two, I think this is a compassionate assessment: the reality is worse.

With a few notable exceptions (and friends notable in their exceptionality), Singapore has brought me the type of people I either didn't know existed, or I knew of and tried to avoid my entire life, with remarkable consistency and tempo; a true barrage of mediocrity.

Last year I wondered if 'it's worth to keep exploring'. After witnessing the dismal way the people I met in Singapore lead their lives, the answer is yes, a thousand times yes, and forever yes: a life spent exploring is a life worth living.

Witnessing the differences in happiness, energy and accomplishment that the friends I met in Singapore display in their early thirties as opposed to those I met abroad has been a defining experience in a defining year, and I'm forever grateful to them for showing me.

Five damns out of Five

▅▇█▇ █

Financials

Keeping it short: collapsing markets this year meant that whatever small cash investment I made turned into, well, a smaller amount of money than I had at the start.

On the other hand, my very own stock has been relentlessly improving. I like my job, I like my life, and I think I'm managing myself well.

I also like that my lifestyle has barely inflated: my most important metric is "f**k-you-money", or how long I can live without any source of income. That's now five years in a high cost of living country, and around 15 years where life is cheap. Considering I started my career with no money at all, that's really something to be grateful for.

Five + damns out of Five

▇▓▓▅ ▓

Love

In 2022 I fell in love twice; both times we ended it because of geographical considerations and the unwillingness to do a long-distance relationship. It's kind of ironic that what I did to my partner in 2020 is now coming to bite me in 2022; karma is clearly a thing.

I also met and dated a large amount of people; not randomly, as I would sometimes do in my early 20s, but deliberately; which makes it even more unsettling to consider that, despite the effort and care, neither of these attempts succeeded.

2022 is the first year I've been ghosted by partners I was seeing; not just once, but repeatedly. Being ghosted is painful and gives one no sense of closure; most importantly it doesn't allow you to learn anything from the experience.

Maybe getting ghosted is a feature of dating in Singapore, rather than dating in my late twenties (I date people my age); but at the same time I also can't help but notice the people I'm meeting now are more bitter, and less hopeful about the future than the people I used to date in my early 20s. So while the number of available partner hasn't really declined for me, their personality has.

A wise friend once told me that relationships are hard because "the car only breaks down after 50,000 miles". At the time I didn't get it, but I do now.

One damn out of Five

▁▁█▂ ▁

Health

Last year I naively wrote "I might very well ride this pandemic out unscathed", obviously that didn't really factor in half the world deciding that covid's over and people being too selfish to wear a mask in crowded places; I ended up catching covid twice this year and both times it was a wild ride.

I'm feeling very pessimistic about the next couple decades or so after seeing how the World handled this pandemic; and honestly that will have an effect on my health (and everyone else's). That feels like a significant dark cloud hanging on our future;

I also developed carpal tunnel and some other small bumps; but I'm grateful for my health. As I get to see my loved ones aging around me, all I can think of is how I must keep taking advantage of my health for as long as I have it.

Five damns out of Five

▁▁▁▅ █

Hobbies

One of the worst things living in Singapore did to me is that it somehow eroded my energy and ability to initiate and pursue new hobbies. In 2021 I wrote: "I can do hobbies - simply because I try - but I do not excel at them". In Singapore, people have very few hobbies - sometimes none at all. As a results, communities are small and inspiration is always far away: it's enough to try something, really, to be best in class. So it's easy to just do the bare minimum and call it a day.

In these circumstances, I found a brilliant community both in Singapore and abroad of people taking photographs; people with a keen eye for the world, that are somehow able to thrive even in very art-averse countries. As a direct result of meeting them, I was able to pick up film photography - something new to me, that also allowed me to express myself in a new way and get some absolutely incredible shots that I am insanely proud to show off.

As a result of photography I was also able to explore - walking more than 4,000 kilometres this year alone - and discover beauty in unexpected places. That and the other few communities I encountered were truly the saving grace of a year that would have otherwise been lost.

Last year I also wrote I wanted to "systematically tackle product design"; I wasn't able to do so as a hobby, but I did it at work - several of my designs were good enough they actually shipped in our production app, and are now used by literally millions of people around the world. Imagine how proud that makes me.

Next year, for obvious reasons, I'll only have one new hobby, which will span across several years: learning Japanese as my fifth high-fluency language. I'm curious to see how that will pan out; but if this year has been an indication, I'll get there no matter how winding the road might be.

Five damns out of Five

▅██▇ █

Places

In 2019, I wrote "I'd love to go and work in Asia on a permanent basis"; that took me over two years. When it finally happened, in 2021, it wasn't at all what I expected: at the end of last year I wrote: "Singapore was supposed to be the place to end all places", but wondered "if I can spend the entirety of 2022 in it".

The answer is a resounding no: I spent roughly half of this year away from Singapore, mostly in Europe, Korea and Taiwan.

In almost fifteen years of living in foreign countries, I've seen things good and bad; what all places had in common, however, was a willingness to improve and grow across a set of metric that I would controversially call the 'Human Development Index metrics'.

Singapore completely breaks this convention: here's a country that is richer and more developed than essentially every other country I've lived in, yet shows a complete disregard for giving its citizens access to the things that make life worth living. Like a secret millionaire living in filth, stashing his income under a frayed mattress, Singapore is all about the accumulation of status and money; it's about the comfort of watching your KPIs increase without actually developing the product. Singapore is a student that has crammed all of the past exams' answers without never actually bothering to understand the textbook's subject.

So what is the subject - what is it that makes a country a compelling place to live in? Is it happiness? Exploration? Self-development? Equality? Some higher ideal? Or simply, the ability to live one's live the way he or she - and not the government, or their parents, or society wants them to?

My major is in research economics. And by every relevant metric I was taught in school, Singapore is a highly developed country. The reality on the ground is different: a tropical hellscape where unhappiness is endemic, a concentration of mundanity and emptiness - a Groundhog Day of capitalism and endlessly repeating supermarket jingles and government-sanctioned prompts, it's the country equivalent of a liminal hotel lobby or a rust belt Strip Mall.

Expatriates call it "boring", locals call it "small": it's a reflection of the inability to truly label this cosmic horror. Singapore is neither small nor boring: it is void, void of beauty, of purpose, of self-exploration, and of the possibility to build a life that isn't mass manufactured and pre-fabricated by convention.

I love Asia and its potential, but I can't live in Singapore, even though I tried - I really did - but this place wins. Five and a half million people live here successfully, but I can't: I'm moving out, early next year, to Tokyo: a place that is everything that Singapore isn't. Or at least, that's what I hope: like a man running out of a burning building, I haven't really stopped to consider all the variables - all I know is, I gotta get out of here.

One damn out of Five

██▁▁ ▁

Wrapping up

I started writing the year in review posts to track my life across several metrics. But over the years, the purpose of the year in review has changed, as has my way of looking at those metrics. 2022 was an ambiguous year: I developed a deep dislike for the place I lived in, but I also got to explore plenty of new ones; my beliefs were challenged, but I learned a lot about what I value in life. I had some significant setbacks, but also some victories. From the metrics themselves, it's hard to say whether 2022 was a success or a failure.

Last year I put down three goals for 2022: I wanted to move towards more design-oriented, creative work; to try my best to make Singapore work, and to find a relationship as good as the one I had in Amsterdam. From this perspective too, I succeeded and failed on all three counts: I did fulfil my creative dreams on the job, but in the end I found purpose and fun in what I already do. I failed to make Singapore work, but I did learn a lot in the process and ultimately successfully plotted my next move - to Japan. And finally, I did find relationships that were as good as the one I had in 2020; they just didn't last.

If 2021 was a transition year, 2022 was a year of acceleration: a trampoline towards my thirties. As I pack my bags once more and prep my move to Japan, I can't help but think about the vast arsenal of intangible skills and ideas I'm bringing with me. In a sense, that's the reason why I do my year in review: not to see how my life has changed along a set of metrics, but rather to see how my way of looking at those metrics has changed.

My biggest challenge next year will be assimilating into a culture that is notoriously insular and complicated. I believe fitting in and learning the language will have to be my primary goal in 2023. Finding some communities to join will be equally challenging, as I'm starting my life, once more, in a new city and a new country. And I do wonder what kind of people I'll encounter in Japan!

Whatever it is, I'm not ready for it. That's a refreshing feeling: as I keep trying the same thing year-in, year-out, the result is always different, beautiful, and unpredictable. I am not carried by the world changing around me, but I react to it. I'm not floating, I'm swimming. And that's a beautiful feeling.

Ever since I graduated, I've made an effort to gather my thoughts and write about my life at the end of each year passing. In 2018, 2019, and 2020 I was eager to crystallise my thoughts into a written post to share with my friends and loved ones.

But in 2021 I felt quite lost, and that's why I have been procrastinating my yearly review until, well, early 2022. Hopefully, writing my thoughts down will help, so here we go.

My job

Any job, even if done on the lowest possible effort, will take a significant chunk of your waking time, during the best years of your life. You don't want to spend those years eating your soul for peanuts; so at the very least an ideal job should be enjoyable to do, and pay well.

My view on this has definitely evolved over the years. In 2018 I was naively excited about hustling four different jobs; in 2019 I focused on the impact my job was having ("helping literally hundreds of thousands of people in leading a better life"), in 2020 I quit, rating the year "an unfortunate blip on an otherwise great track record of passion and drive at work".

Passion and drive? Over the years I have become more and more disillusioned about the real impact any individual can really have on a global scale. I also have this sinking feeling that every year from now on is going to be worse for the world than the one before, and my job is not doing much to prevent or change that. The passion is still there; the drive, much less so.

By my two key metrics (enjoyable to do and paid well), my new job has been a success throughout 2021. The product I work on is used daily by around 3 million people; my colleagues are just as smart as the ones I met at my previous workplaces, and my stress levels are mostly manageable. I am still learning useful skills.

I just can't keep wondering: is this all there is to it? I do get challenged on the job, and I can work in Lisbon, in Singapore or in Amsterdam (or remotely...) giving me the freedom to explore new regions and cultures basically every year. Financially, I am paid plenty of money to basically think about stuff and occasionally write emails.

But last year I wrote "I hope to be as excited about work at the end of 2021 as I was in 2019". Honestly even though my responsibilities and pay have grown, my drive hasn't. I am no longer excited about my work; I am passionate and content about my work - and there's a difference there, which is subtle but relevant.

The classic question is: "if you won the lottery, would you quit your job?". I use to think I wouldn't, but I don't know anymore. Sure, my job helps me learn things about the world and about myself; it forces me to be confronted with personal and technical challenges I would otherwise avoid, and as the last four years show, it's the primary catalyst towards changing my world view. But it doesn't seem to have a higher purpose.

And if that's the case - then maybe I am really only working because I have to.

Two damns out of five

Friends

In 2021 I lived in three places: Tallinn, Lisbon and Singapore. In each of these I met a significant, but small, number of cool new people. Some of them could have been my best friend back in college; yet it's hard to match schedules and planning the next meet-up takes effort and time. This is a side effect of growing older, and moving around a lot.

But the people I meet are diverse, and interesting. This year I got to know Brazilian college drop outs, American millionaires, Chinese actors, Estonian doctors, a Lithuanian witch, Taiwanese pilots, and many more characters that I can vividly see in my mind, right now - a colorful cast making my life more interesting at every step. Each of them is a bunch of threads weaving back into the tapestry of my memories.

What I do wonder, is whether I can keep up this lifestyle in the next 2, 5, 10 years. The people around me are settling down, whether I like it to admit it or not; and with kids, pets, houses and whatnot come increased responsibilities, limited time, and new interests that I might not be a part of. Would it be worth it to stick to the friends I have instead of moving countries every 6 months? My answer right now is it's fine to keep exploring - even though I might regret this a few years down the line.

Four damns out of five

Financials

'Financials' was not on last year's list, but it is a relevant item to reflect about this year, so it's making a comeback.

Having more money than before is not making me happier. In 2019 I wrote "While I don't care much about money itself, I used to be very stressed about the lack thereof". That stress is now gone, but has been replaced with a new form of stress - that of worrying about where to store, what's happening with, and how to use my finances in the best way possible.

I definitely will need to figure this one out; yet somehow it's never interesting enough to me to make it a priority. Some of my friends are literally obsessed with money - and I'm not talking about investments or financial management: it's the kind of people who pays with different credit cards at different restaurants, so that they can get 5 dollars extra cashback a month.

I don't want to live like that. But I also feel I could be using my financial luck in better ways than what I'm doing right now. At the end of this year I made my first investment; it's stressing and uninteresting, but also - it's a start.

Three damns out of five

Love

Last year I was in love, but we still decided to break up as I was going to be abroad and didn't want to do a long distance relationship. Last year I also wrote this: "effortless relationships very much exist - they are just few and far between". I was right, and I'd also underestimated how few these are.

This year I dove head first into dating again, and despite a raging pandemic I went out with many brilliant people that I respected, liked, and whose company I truly enjoyed. Even so, the people were amazing but the relationship never quite managed to recapture the magic I found last year.

I don't regret taking the decision to break up, even though I do miss having a partner every day. And I realize now how hard it is to find someone you can truly build things together with. Ultimately, the relationships I had in 2021 were so far removed from the one I wrote about in 2020, that I am now starting to worry my 'love' section in 2020 might have been a one-time fluke.

Two damns out of five

Health

In 2019 I wrote: "If you expect to live until 90, it does make sense to stay healthy. But if (like me) you fully expect to fizzle out by the time you're in your 50s, then the time spent in the gym is better invested, well, anywhere else."

I now realize how stupid that approach was. My health in 2021 has been disappointing: heart problems, food problems, migraines, nausea, and whatnot - I feel like I'm definitely on a downhill slope, and it is terrible to not be able to perform at 100% capacity.

I have been walking (around 400km a month), biking (about the same), and I've picked up swimming and bouldering (both thanks to Singapore's habit of having swimming pools in every condo, and climbing gyms in every mall). My energy levels are higher, my blood tests nominal, and I feel better about myself.

On top of that, I got vaccinated three times against Covid, which is an absolute miracle of both science and logistics. I might very well ride this pandemic out unscathed, and that thought makes me feel both happy and incredibly lucky at once.

But still, barely a passing mark for my health this year.

Three damns out of five

Hobbies

This year I finally learned how to cook properly - and documented plenty of recipes to boot. I also started an actual product management blog, and began doing consultancy on the side. I tried (and failed at) being a digital nomad. I did some Courseras on hardware programming. I also took hundreds of great photographs, and found a good place to publish them. As mentioned in 'health', I am now bouldering on the regular. I also biked a lot.

All of these are essentially recreational hobbies: I can do these better than the average person - simply because I try - but I do not excel at them. Instead, I wish I had the time and dedication to deliberately practice and become a remarkable figure in what I do on the side.

For me, hobbies are a way to counteract the apathy of finishing work at half past five and spending the rest of the evening scrolling aimlessly on Instagram or Tik Tok. They should also be a way to become a better, more interesting person - for myself and for others. As I cross the easier hobbies off the list, the challenge becomes to continue trying new things - and hopefully excelling at them.

This year, I'm planning to systematically tackle product design, either with a digital product, or through industrial design; I also feel like I have less and less energy to start new hobbies and keep up with existing ones, so that will be a good way to keep the challenge up in 2022.

Four damns out of five

Places

In 2019, I wrote "I'd love to go and work in Asia on a permanent basis"; in 2020 I was still obsessing over the "Asian Fiasco"; in 2021 after almost two years of attempts I did manage to move to Singapore after all.

When planning my move, I figured that moving to a place I knew relatively well, on a salary that would allow me to live very comfortably would essentially be a cakewalk. I was unfortunately wrong: Singapore is a city-state that values different things than those I love; a very consumeristic place that drains my health (both mental and physical) and does not encourage me - or enable me - to do my best work.

Throughout the year I moved thrice: first to Estonia, then to Portugal, and finally to Singapore. I thought Estonia and Portugal would feel like transit destinations; instead they turned out to be incredibly meaningful places where I made some incredible memories and discoveries.

Singapore on the other hand was supposed to be the place to end all places; the spot where I would finally settle down in my late 20s. On paper, it looked like the perfect place for me. In practice, I'm not even sure if I can spend the entirety of 2022 in it.

As the saying goes - "be careful what you wish for".

One damn out of five

Wrapping up

2021 was an unsatisfying year, and not just because of the pandemic dragging on. From a rational point of view, I achieved everything I wanted when I started writing this blog. But I've changed a lot, and I'm just not sure anymore that those were the right goals.

As it stands, I have an absolutely fantastic job, yet I hardly feel any excitement about what the future may bring career-wise. I am living in Singapore, the one city I have been trying to reach since the start of the Covid epidemic; yet somehow I am failing to get the right vibes from it. And as 2022 rolls in, I can record what a confusing year I've had, but I can't really think about how to improve my life moving forward.

Most of all, I feel like I'm floating. I read less and less, do less and less hobbies, and many evenings find me aimlessly scrolling the web, reading news, or just straight out wasting time. It's clear something is not working, but I don't really know what.

If I really wanted to put down three goals for this year:

• One, I want to pick up structured creativity again and potentially prep for a career switch into a more design-oriented role;
• Two, I want to try and make Singapore work. But if it doesn't, I'll need to have an idea of where to go next - a destination list of places that are not going to backfire like Singapore did - and start prepping to move out as soon as my lease lock-in expires in December 2022;
• Third, I'd want to take a real shot at finding a relationship as interesting as the one I had in 2020; if it can't be effortless, I'll have to put in the effort then.

Work, Places and Love were my worst ranked categories this year, so it totally makes sense that those are my three main objectives where I want to improve.

I also believe it's time for me to start thinking about what I want to do in the longer term: I've had many careers and many lives, in a way, for someone my age - and that gives me the luxury to be picky and conscious about what works for me and what doesn't.

2021 was in many regards a transition year, lived with suitcases always packed, always ready to go, always building something, always going somewhere. It's ironic then, that despite starting a new job, living in three wildly different places, and doing so much, I feel like I went nowhere.

May 2022 be different.

• Beef
• Vegetable oil (I used olive)
• Corn Starch
• Hot pepper
• Scallions (green onions)
• Soy Sauce
• Brown Sugar
• Ginger
• Garlic
• Water

What you'll do

Add some of oil to a pan and sautee the finely minced garlic and ginger for 2-3 minutes. Pour in 1/4 cup of water and 1/4 cup of soy sauce, add in 1/3 cup of brown sugar (yes, sugar), and bring the sauce to a boil for a couple minutes. Remove the sauce from the heat.

Now, cut the beef meat into slices (strings) against the grain - the thicker the slice, the longer you'll need to braise it. Now toss the meet into the corn starch, covering it on all sides until it's nicely dry. Put it in a sieve to shake off the excess corn starch.

Now add some oil to a wok and when it's hot add in the meat (it should sizzle). Braise - if necessary in batches - your meat slices for 1-2 minutes per side. When all the meat is done, put it on a paper towel to pat off the excess oil.

Finally, remove the oil from the wok, and add in the sauce you previously removed from the heat. When the sauce is hot (almost boiling), add in the meat and simmer for 3-4 minutes until the sauce is nicely thickened and coats the meat. Finally add in the chopped scallions and hot pepper.

It's delicious!

What you'll get

• Carnaroli or Arborio rice
• Pepper, oil, salt
• Onion
• Saffron
• (optional) sour berries
• Butter
• Beef or chicken stock

What you'll do

Bring some water to the boil and take around 50ml out. Mix with 15-20 saffron pistils in a pestel (if you have it - if not just crunch the pistils using the bottom of a cup).

Throw in a stock cube in the remaining water (do not mix with saffron water). Dice an onion in super fine pieces, sweat it for 2-3 minutes together with some oil in a pan, then add in the rice and toast it. After a minute or so deglaze with some of the stock. Continue adding stock as well as half of the saffron water for around 15 minutes. Add in the rest of the saffron water and cook for 2 more minutes. Finally, add in some butter, grated parmesan, the optional sour berries, and let rest ('mantecare').

After 2 minutes of 'mantecare', serve!

What you'll get

• Ground beef (250g)
• Salt, pepper, oil, sugar
• Chilli or cayene
• Basil or Parsley
• Tomato sauce (300gr to 500gr)
• Mozzarella
• Parmesan
• Ricotta or cream cheese
• Egg
• No-boil lasagna

What you'll do

Heat a pan to high with some oil in it, and throw in the ground beef, salt, pepper, cayenne and a teaspoon of sugar until it's nicely browned. Remove the meat juices (if you want) and let it simmer together with the tomato sauce in a big saucepan for 5 minutes.

In the meantime, cut the mozzarella into small cubes and mix it with the ricotta (150 gr should be fine), finely grated parmesan, and one egg.

Now, pre-heat the oven to 190°C. It's important you buy no-boil lasagna noodles (if you have boil ones, you'll need to cook them first in pasta water! But with no-boil you can move directly to preparing your lasagna). Stack three layers of: red sauce, lasagna sheet, another lasagna sheet, cheese mixture, then red sauce, lasagna sheet, ... etc: the top layer should be a cheese layer.

Cover with aluminum foil and oven bake for 20 minutes. Remove the foil, sprinkle in the finely chopped basil or parsley, and cook 10 more minutes. 1 hour from start to finish, and you're ready to go!

What you'll get

• Lemon
• Heavy cream
• Spaghetti
• Oil, salt, pepper
• Parsley
• White wine
• Salmon (optional)

What you'll do

Cook the pasta in a pot until it's a minute before 'al dente'. If you're good at timing, you can dump it directly in the saucepan (the next step) - if not, just put it aside.

Sweat the shallots for a few minutes with some olive oil. Deglaze with a splash of white wine, then after most of the wine has evaporated add in the lemon juice and lemon zest from one lemon. Add in 1/2 cup of heavy cream and some pepper. Add in the finely chopped parsley. Finally, when the sauce has the right consistency, add in the pasta. Toss it until it's well coated with the thick sauce - if the sauce is too thick you can always add in some pasta water!

On the side, I have a salmon fillet here: season it with salt and pepper, rub some oil, then cook it on medium heat starting with the top side first, 3 minutes, then the skin side, 2-4 minutes. But you can also just eat the pasta on its own!

What you'll get

• Chicken breast or chicken fillet - not too thick!
• Panko (or just grated bread)
• Buns (or ciabatta!)
• Oil, Salt, Pepper
• Tomato
• Hot Sauce
• Mayonnaise
• Flour

What you'll do

Pat dry, tenderize, and season the chicken. In a skillet add in about half a centimeter of oil (more if your chicken is thicker) and simmer it on high heat.

In the meantime, mix 1 cup of flour with 1 tablespoon of salt and 3 tablespoons of cayenne pepper - this is your first station.

Second station: 2 eggs and 2 to 4 tablespoons (depending on your taste) of hot sauce

Third station: the panko.

You can now dip the chicken into the flour, shake off any excess, dunk it into the egg (second station), shake off, and finally cover it with panko (third station); then drop it in the oil (careful for splatters!) and fry it, 3 minutes per side.

In the meantime, you can toast the hamburger buns with some butter and mix Mayonnaise and Hot Sauce (I suggest a 3 to 1 rate) for a delicious sauce. You can also, if you want, char some cherry tomatoes in the same pan.

Once the chicken is golden brown, place it on a rack for 5 minutes to cool off and lose some oil. Once you're ready, assemble the buns, the katsu, and any burger fillings such as the roasted tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, pickles, etc. to taste. Add in a generous amount of the mayo mix you made earlier, and serve!

What you'll get

• Steak cut
• Peas
• Parsley
• Oil, salt, pepper
• Tomato
• Oregano and thyme (optional)

What you'll do

Preheat the oven to 210 degrees. While it heats up, you can cut a tomato in two, add some oil and oregano, and put it in the oven: oven baked tomatoes are the best, but the time to cook will varied based on the tomato's size, variety, and the season - and of course the oven you use.

Season the steak with salt and pepper on both sides and let rest. After half an hour to two hours, put some oil in a cast iron skillet on medium high, and sizzle/sear the steak around 2 to 3 minutes per side. Add in some thyme or rosemary for extra flavour!

Place in the oven and finish cooking for around 10 minutes (well done). As usual, if you have a meat thermometer: medium rare 55°C, well done 70°C.

While the steak finishes cooking, add some butter and frozen peas into a pan and rehydrate them for 3 to 5 minutes. Add into a blender with milk and chopped parsley, plus some salt if you want. Sieve it if you like your puree to be extra smooth, and serve on the side or as dippings.

Total time: sub 20 minutes, total price: sub 5 euro. Yet your date will be impressed!

What you'll get

• Rice
• Vegetables (I used peas and courgettes)
• Egg
• Proteins (I used scampi and shrimp)
• Cilantro or parsley
• Oil, Salt, Pepper

What you'll do

Wash the rice under water until the starch is removed (the water from the washing should be clear, not opalescent). Add 2 cups of water for each cup of rice, and cook.

This isn't risotto: the rice should be crunchy, not glutinous - the best way is to leave it after cooking for a few hours (or in the fridge...overnight rice!) or put it in the oven for a few minutes. Up to you!

In the meantime, cook your onions, vegetables, oil and shrimp in a large wok pan. Break a couple of eggs and mix them in a bowl - then in a separate pan use the mix to make what's basically scrambled egg. You can add in part of the egg mix at the end if you feel comfortable about risking salmonella - I don't so in my version of this dish I scramble all of the egg mixture separately so it's cooked through.

Finally add the rice and scrambled eggs back into the wok pan. Add in spices and finely chopped cilantro, lemon juice, and serve!

What you'll get

• Saffron
• Rice
• Eggs
• Yoghurt
• Salt
• Neutral oil
• Dried barberries
• (optional) butter

What you'll do:

Press the saffran pistils into a powder using the back of a cup and some rough salt (or a pestel if you have it). Put a few tablespoons of hot water into the cup and leave it for 10 minutes so that the taste has time to be extracted from the powder saffron.

Wash your rice under water until the water is all clear (no more starch). Bring some water to the boil, add in significant amounts of salt (1 to 2 cups, with 2 cups being really salty) and parboil the rice for 6 to 8 minutes.

Mix 1 cup of yoghurt, 1/2 cups of vegetable oil, 3 egg yolks, a tablespoon of salt, and the saffron water. Whisk thoroughly, then fold in the rice.

Finally, fill an oven dish with half the rice mixture. Sautee the barberries with some butter or oil to re-hydrate them, add them in, then cover with the other half of the rice mixture. Bake for 60 to 85 minutes at 200°C until the bottom is golden brown. Flip and serve!

What you'll get

• Pain perdu (old bread)
• Potatoes
• (optional) other vegetables
• Chilli flakes
• Oregano
• Onions
• Fresh parsley
• Eggs
• Salt, pepper, oil

What you'll do

Finely chop an onion and sweat it in a hot non-stick pan with some olive oil. Dice some potatoes (and other vegetables of similar consistency if you want - I used eggplants) into small cubes. Throw them in with the onions, some salt, pepper, and chilli flakes (if you like spicy) until they are golden brown.

Cut some slices of old bread into cubes and toss it in a bowl together with the potatoes, onions and vegetables you baked earlier. Add in 1 cup of grated cheddar (or similar cheeses that melt well, like young Gouda, Edam, or Gruyere). Sprinkle some oregano if you have it.

Finally, break 4 to 6 eggs and mix them together with some finely chopped parsley.

Pour half the egg mixture into an oven dish. Add in the bread, vegs, and cheese you mixed earlier. Make sure to press them down so that there is no air pockets between them and the egg mixture. Pour the remaining half of the egg mixture on top - making sure to cover the dish evenly.

Optionally grate some more cheese on top. Throw into the oven at 200° C for between 25 and 35 minutes - stop as soon as the egg in the middle of the oven dish is firm - which you can inspect by using a spoon. Enjoy!

What you'll get

• Coconut flour (or any flour)
• Coconut milk (or any milk)
• Banana
• Flaxseed (or oats)
• Eggs
• Vanilla extract
• Cinnamon
• Baking powder
• Baking soda
• (optional) Nutmeg
• Sugar and salt

What you'll do

Mash one big banana with some flaxseed (or ground oats), around 1 tablespoon, and 1/2 cup of coconut milk (or regular milk).

Now mix in 1 sifted cup of coconut flour with 1 tablespoon of vanilla extract, 2 egg yolks, 1 tablespoon of baking powder and 1/2 tablespoons of baking soda. Optionally add 1 or 2 tablespoons of ground cinnamon and a pinch of nutmeg. Add in a pinch of salt and whisk - if it's too thick, add in more milk (or coconut milk)

You can whisk the white of the eggs with sugar separately to make meringue - this will make the pancakes fluffy but also takes quite some times. I didn't do it this time. If you do, fold them in at the end.

Cook in a nonstick pan, around 2-3 minutes per side. Serve with maple syrup and fruit (I also added some greek yoghurt and vanilla on the side).

What you'll get

• Paprika
• Coriander
• Cumin
• Chicken
• Parsley (optional)
• Oil, salt, pepper
• Greek yoghurt
• Ginger (optional)
• Chilli flakes
• Onion
• Lemon or lime (optional)

What you'll do

Take the chicken breast and put them on a plate between paper towels. Pat them dry and season with some salt and pepper.

In a pan, cook the oil and sweat the finely chopped onions. Add in 1 tablespoon of paprika powder and 1 tablespoon of cumin. Chop a few leaves of coriander or cilantro very finely and throw 'em in too.

Put the content in a bowl and let cool for a bit. When they are no longer too hot, add in 1/2 to 1 cup of greek yoghurt, some chilli flakes, salt, pepper, ground fresh ginger, and mix it thoroughly!

Now dunk the chicken in your marinade and massage it so the marinade gets everywhere, then place it in a plastic bag and in the fridge for a few hours. You might be a smartass like me and think 'this is pretty strong, no need to wait' and what you'll get is delicious chicken on the outside, normal chicken on the inside. Don't be dumb like that: the delicious marinade taste needs to be absorbed - so leave it in the fridge for a few hours.

When the marinade is done, place the chicken on a baking tray on aluminum foil (warning: the marinade will get runny and leak on the tray, and it's hard to clean afterwards - so make sure the foil is covering the entire tray). Bake in the oven at 200 degrees for 20 minutes, then flip the chicken breasts and cook for 20 more minutes (or until golden brown and crispy). If it gets too dry, baste with either melted butter or lemon juice.

Serve garnished with parsley and with a sprinkle of lemon juice!

What you'll get