2025年年终总结2025 Year in Review

Problem Child — Onyx

Piece No. 4

Prologue

Come year's end, taking stock seems to become an instinct: what did this year leave behind? And what did it take away?

The answers are often hidden in the ordinary places we barely notice, flickering like a faint light — quiet, yet real.

Looking Back

How fast it goes — another year is nearly over.

2025, what story did you have to tell?

Looking back on 2025, it's hard to sum up with any single clear keyword. More often, it showed up as the everyday that each of us is immersed in: work kept moving forward, life kept unfolding, uncertainty didn't disappear, but we began learning to live alongside it.

This year, with resolve, exploration, and letting-go — again and again — I dissolved the anxiety, the confusion, the inner churn.

2025, still believing: sincerity always finds an answer.

Turning past this year's laughter, regrets, and letting-go, I take every earnest moment of living and let them gather into the good harvest of the future.

High-five 2025 one more time, and tuck away, carefully, all its encounters and its hard-won lessons.

2026 — carrying the thickness this year stored up, I set off light. Go push open that door left ajar, and welcome the 21st century's Q2.

Anyway, here's my 2025 year in review — enjoy:

01 Reading: A person still needs to make something

2025 is my tenth year (plus 120 days) keeping company with WeChat Reading. Over ten years it went from a tool to my most familiar old friend.

(Figure in original.)

In life, I look for quiet through reading; in reading, I look for life's rhythm. Looking back on this year: 354 days of company, 532 hours of immersion, 8.33 million characters flowing past. The numbers themselves don't really matter; what matters is that they recorded the bit of quiet I stole, drop by drop, in the cracks of a busy life.

(Figure in original.)

This year I opened 230 books, and though I only finished 30 of them in the end, this "strolling" state left me feeling very relaxed — no longer forcing myself to turn to the last page, but wandering freely among different ideas as the mood took me.

Amid books and films, I widen the boundaries of what I know. The base hue of this year's reading is still my beloved sociology, psychology, business and management, and biography — they're like four pillars holding up my inner world.

Compared with last year, I'm more at peace this year. If 2024's reading was "a little sweetness" in a bitter life, then 2025's reading was more like building out a forest for myself.

(Figure in original.)

In Trading in the Zone and Trading for a Living, I learned how to make peace with my own desires and fears. In The Nvidia Way and The Worlds I See, I traced and felt the roads that the AI era's "godfather" and "godmother" had traveled to get here; in Four Hundred Years of Taiwan and The Story of Mankind, through the long lens of history, I tried to see clearly the patterns that come around again and again.

One takeaway of recent years: complementarity always binds people together more tightly than parity does. All these years of reading and I hadn't grasped this — no wonder that, well into my years, I still fancied myself independent out of sheer "refusal to compromise."

02 Film: The dazzle of Chinese animation

In 2025, while turning those 8.33 million characters, I also left 24 precious marks in light and shadow — mirrors of the path my life took.

(Figure in original.)

Looking back at this year's film list, I found I was still searching, across different media, for the same answer.

• On games and reality: on the shelf there was Trading in the Zone, and on the screen there came The Lehman Trilogy, Industry, and Dumb Money. These stories are like so many vivid mirrors, reflecting desire, risk, and the flood of the times, letting me see, beyond the logic of books, the more real body-heat of human nature and reality.
• On excellence and restraint: Becoming Warren Buffett and Federer: Twelve Final Days — whether an investing legend or a sporting GOAT, that decade-in, decade-out focus and restraint they carry has some wondrous resonance with the sound of my own breathing when I run.
• On life's "little sweetness": in the worlds of Nobody and Ne Zha, those moments of refusing to bow to fate always bring a little long-missed innocence and comfort to adult life, and let me truly feel how Chinese animation has surged up out of nowhere these past few years.

Light and shadow are an extension of the real world. Sometimes, watching a Secret Life of Walter Mitty is like going somewhere far away on behalf of the self who can't get away; watching an episode of Grand Maison Tokyo is like sharing a cup of fine wine with those artisans who chase the ultimate.

Recording film and TV, for me, may not be simple diversion, but a series of "pause buttons" I press for myself in a fast-paced life. Here, I can be the worker weaving through the city, or the dreamer crossing the wilderness.

03 Running: Your attitude toward winter running is your attitude toward life

If ambition ≈ vitality, then my vitality comes almost entirely from my boundless ambition toward myself in sport.

On the running front, I kept on this year, gaining a little ground each day.

(Figure in original.)

Distance runners often come to know a wonderful experience: flow tends to appear in the middle-to-late stretch of the journey — the calm after the excitement, the detachment after the abandon, no need to prove or promise anything to anyone, every stride a movement of music in its own right.

Sometimes life, and making a product, is the same: sow for a long while, and only then can you lose yourself — and revisit the source of the drive to create.

The world is very loud, dazzling and glossy and glamorous in a thousand ways, but the things that actually have to do with you are very, very few.

Just focus on that part.

Talk about running, and you're bound to hit one word: perseverance.

Why persevere? Because across this one life, in so many things you do, it's terribly easy to confuse the goal with the result. Many things are results, not goals. Promotions and raises, financial freedom, are results; sleeping and rising early, staying healthy, are goals.

Like running a marathon — is winning the medal the goal? It's the result. Discovering a whole new you is the goal. I beat myself; I conquered something I used to be terribly afraid of. That gives you confidence: whatever I want to do, I can do. Whatever I want, I can stick to.

Really, look at a person's attitude toward running — toward winter running especially — and that's their attitude toward life. It ties one concrete behavior, winter running, to a whole attitude toward life, because it's in the extreme or the isolated that a person's essential character and values show most clearly.

Winter running is an act of challenging the body's comfort zone. The weather is cold, the mornings pitch-black, the body's laziness is physical — and in this anti-human situation, someone who still gets up in the dark and chooses to keep running tends to have traits like self-discipline, grit, and a strong sense of purpose. I really do have such people around me; every time one of them posts to Moments in the morning, it's them running alone under a streetlamp.

Mapped onto life: when we face hardship, a low point, cold shoulders, or pressure, can we still keep a forward-leaning posture — much like you, running in the cold wind, no friends, no encouragement, just yourself running on ahead.

And so winter running becomes a simulator for life's circumstances; it can test and reveal a person's true resilience and breadth.

The three great elements of life are health, wealth, and happiness. We pursue them in the order of wealth, health, happiness, but ranked by importance, it's the reverse.

If moderate exercise really can extend life, then it's the most worthwhile investment there is. Because it's the only activity in the world where what you put in is time, and what it pays back is also time.

04 Why practice sport

More than 95% of children will never become professional athletes — so why do so many parents pour money into having their kids train in sport?

They pour in the money not for the championship trophy, not to pay for drills of various moves; they're buying their child a lifelong trump card of the strong.

(Figure in original.)

The most important lesson sport teaches a child is this: the vast majority of valuable things in the world can't be had by an "instant click"; they must be exchanged for through the compounding of sweat and time. What sport gives is delayed gratification + high-pressure survival. What's truly valuable is that heart, forged and hammered over and over.

On the field, what a child learns is never some particular move, but that when you fall and no one lifts you up, you have to stand up yourself; that when you're behind on the scoreboard and physically spent, you still have to fight to the last second; that when battered again and again by the referee, the opponent, and defeat, your emotions don't collapse and your rhythm doesn't fall apart.

What's trained is the ferocity to pick himself up after a fall, the fire to still dare fight to the last second when behind, the pressure-proof heart that will never break when life comes hammering later, the toughness to grit his teeth and grind through when he hits a hard patch.

These things books can't teach, and games can't give (games give instant reward). Today's entertainment — short videos, games — gives feedback too fast, while sport's feedback is extremely slow. To improve a result by a single second may take a dull ten thousand repetitions of a move.

The Western way of raising sons on hardship is athletic training; the way of raising daughters in refinement leans on the crafts.

Some growth can't be tallied as a score, but will save your life again and again in the future. The strong-person mindset a child hones on the field lets him win at the root on any field life throws at him.

Sport isn't the narrow gate to "professional athlete"; it's the fast lane to a "strong-person character."

Many people think training is training and competition is competition — two separate things. Not so. Dead wrong.

How you train is exactly how you compete, not a hair's difference. Steps you jogged carelessly in training, balls you hit carelessly, will absolutely cost you points in competition; runs you were too lazy to do in training will absolutely make you crash in the back half of the race. If you treat every training session as a real competition, then competition will almost never go too badly; the feel in your hands and legs doesn't lie — muscle has memory.

The real win or loss is decided back in training. Standing on the field of play is just showing off what you usually practice. Remember, the competition doesn't begin when the referee says start; it begins the moment you walk into the training hall each day.

Losing at the starting line isn't scary; what's scary is not knowing where the starting line is.

05 On People: Reading people is a lifelong lesson

1. Middle-aged, you have to keep the ability to make new friends. If you were allowed to ask a new friend for their handle on one social-media platform, to get to know them, which would you choose?

2. At twenty, I thought this kind of life was dazzling: graduated from a top school, executive at a famous firm, buying luxury goods on a whim, traveling abroad several times a year, flying first class and staying in luxury hotels, a work machine who acts with swift decision, a refined, decent, hardworking middle-class life. Only at thirty did I feel all of the above amounts to nothing; the life worth envying is this: to have brought real value to the world rather than just earned a paycheck, to have a family of intimacy and trust, to have a few children who are all upright and kind, not necessarily to rise above others but to keep curiosity and lifelong learning, to always be able to be of use, and when you leave this world, for some people to feel genuine grief and regret from the heart.

The former is a "good life" sample you were educated into; the latter is what's real and full of strength. The former's half-life is only two or three years before you feel an immense emptiness — the external tags can't give any inner stability — and then you'll have to re-examine your sense of self-worth.

3. 2025 saw its share of darkest moments. When you ask others for help, what matters most isn't being accepted or refused; it's that the process let me see so many people's (so-called friends') ways of communicating and getting along.

People often have a psychological illusion that the purpose of "asking for help" is merely to trade for some concrete fruit — a resource, an opportunity, or a gesture that defuses a crisis. But once you've truly been through that moment of lowering your posture and laying your difficulty bare, you'll find that asking for help is essentially a high-intensity social experiment.

Asking someone for help is a "flood of harsh light" in social relations.

In smooth everyday socializing, everyone maintains a kind of warm, tender false balance. It's what Professor Liu Yu calls "the art of the possible" — as long as no one touches the boundary, the world looks prosperous and friendly. But the moment you press that red "emergency help" button, this balance is shattered in an instant.

What leaves you most helpless isn't being refused — refusal itself may stem from the limits of ability or objective constraints, which is fair enough; nor is it moral blackmail, forcing someone to lend a hand.

What truly stings is the communication granularity a person shows in the moment of responding. Some choose to vanish, the chat window turning at once into a cold cyber-wasteland; some start deftly piling up polished words, using an extremely courteous aloofness to build a barrier transparent yet hard; some even let slip a subtle, faintly superior scrutiny.

For some people, a "like" is courtesy, and helping out is friendship. But this is exactly a rite of passage in growing up: a person has to be honed "in the doing." Both things and people are always in flux.

When a person is very young, because their starting point is low, they pose no threat to those around them, and they're worth having hopes for, there are always many people and things that can help us. In this stage we're like a sponge, wildly soaking up water and nutrients, and we come to feel we should learn to borrow strength, to stand on higher and broader shoulders. But past a certain age (it varies by person), the absorption rate begins to slow, and we begin to pose some threat to those around us, or else we no longer hold enough value or promise for our surroundings; the outside forces that help us may begin to dwindle, and the resistance begins to grow. And so, used to taking and absorbing, we go through helplessness and loss of varying degrees. At this point it's especially easy to feel doubt, resentment, and denial toward the world. It's a very painful and difficult stage — very lonely, very helpless.

Then one word gradually comes into focus in our minds: worth.

Are we worth others' continued help, support, and hope? What kind of person, exactly, is worth our continuing to give and to hope for? To what people and things are we ourselves worth hoping for?

Think about these, and you'll find that two questions — "who am I, really" and "to which people and things am I of value" — become unusually crucial. And you'll find that the road ahead, the gains and losses, will very likely depend to an enormous degree on what choices we make, what kind of person we become, and what people and things we keep company with.

It's strange — some things you can only truly understand once you've lived them. Everything else I've been through becomes my boat, my shoes, my bicycle, all my tools, carrying me to the far shore.

(Figure in original.)

Every important person I've met, every event that shook me, every emotional pang, every mental vexation and bewilderment — all of it is, to me, infinitely worth recording.

You'll understand: the people who are still willing to reach out a hand in your muddiest moment are giving not just help, but their scarcest thing — trust. And what you have to do is not betray that trust and that help.

Your achievements let others know you; your failures let you know yourself. Being liked for fame, reputation, family, hometown, wealth, income, profession, company, even rank, is actually a bad thing. Because these are conferred, and they're too easily replaced. If you can be liked because someone finds you interesting, lovable, witty, sincere, curious, kind, and full of passion for life — that would be just wonderful.

Tuck away, carefully, all these encounters and hard-won lessons that 2025 brought through asking for help.

06 Why America has sugar in four colors

If you go eat at a restaurant in America, you'll see four colors of sugar on the table: white, yellow, blue, and pink — what's the difference, exactly? Many people will instinctively wonder: is one healthier, is one more upscale?

These four sugars aren't about ranking good and bad; they're about matching the situation.

(Figure in original.)

White: the only real sugar. The ingredients are straightforward — just sucrose, from cane or beet. Its trait is honesty: it has calories, it raises blood sugar, its taste is natural and clean with no strange aftertaste. Americans don't agonize over whether white sugar is healthy; they just want the real taste — we're eating sugar; when we don't need it, we don't use it.

Yellow: the most common. This is Truvia (stevia), Lakanto (monk fruit); its main ingredient is sucralose, the most frequently seen sugar substitute in American restaurants, for a simple reason: it has almost no calories, little effect on blood sugar, a sweetness close to real sugar, and it can be heated and put in coffee — so when Americans drink coffee or black tea, yellow is what they use. It's not the most natural, but it's the most middle-of-the-road choice.

Blue: tastes the most like sugar. The main ingredient is aspartame; its advantages are obvious — no calories, and a sweetness very close to real sugar — but its limits are just as clear: it can't take high heat, and some patients can't use it. So in America it's used more for cold drinks; blue's logic is taste first, but with plenty of restrictions.

Pink: the most old-school sugar substitute — it's really just saccharin, the longest-standing sugar substitute in American history, with a distinctive trait: intensely sweet, so sweet it turns bitter. Some are used to it, some can't stand it at all; few people use it now, and it shows up more in some old cafes, used steadily by older folks. That pink packet is more like a carry-over of an American habit.

In Friends, Season 1, Episode 8, Monica and Ross's grandmother has passed away, and as they sort through her things they open a box stuffed full of these pink sugar packets — a very high-class detail in Friends. In 1990s America, pink sugar — that saccharin — had a user base highly concentrated among older women. Saccharin was a symbolic tool of control; they wanted it known that even in the matter of eating sugar, I too am a person who can exercise self-control.

Why talk about sugar? Many Chinese students, entering American society for the first time, find the hardest thing to adjust to isn't the language, isn't the coursework, isn't even the system, but this cultural structure where you can choose, but you must be responsible for your choice.

In East Asian societies, and especially in a Chinese upbringing, rules often come before the individual, standards are given by the collective, and individual deviation gets the individual corrected. But in America the rule is more like a table with the yellow, white, blue, and pink sugars all laid out on it.

You can eat any packet, and no one judges whether you should or shouldn't; but whichever one you eat over the long run, it all ends up showing on you yourself.

This is precisely the hidden watershed that many international students inevitably go through in matters of identity and value choice; it's not about who's more right, but who has to take responsibility, earlier, for the consequences of their own life.

The real China–US difference is never in the grand narrative, but hidden in these unremarkable little objects: a packet of sugar, a cup of coffee, a moment no one decides for you.

07 Why America has a "kill line"

Lately America's "kill line" has been trending. The kill line refers to how, once middle- or high-income people are hit by a blow like unemployment or illness, financial rock-bottom triggers a chain reaction. Step on the "kill line" once, and the social system pushes you, step by step, toward the abyss.

Take this former Meta engineer: just half a year after losing his job, he went from a senior Silicon Valley engineer to a homeless man in a shelter. And in America there are many like them, tripped into the "kill line" by unemployment.

Many people have a question: why are American wages so high and their spending power so seemingly strong? Wages aren't low, yet by month's end you still find your wallet empty, and the kill line still exists?

Some say it's that Americans don't save and love to spend. But that's only half right. The American economy is indeed consumption-driven. But in America, a lot of money isn't spent because you want to — it's that you can't not spend it.

Start with the house. Many Chinese people envy living in a detached house; it looks so free, so "American Dream." But once you actually live in one, you find that freedom has maintenance costs.

Gutters have to be cleaned, or one heavy rain can flood your home; the roof has to be replaced every dozen years or so, and a replacement easily runs into the tens of thousands of dollars; unwashed exterior walls grow mold, and in some places you have to guard against termites, or the house really will be slowly eaten hollow.

These aren't fussiness — they're things that go wrong if you don't do them.

You can of course try to be self-sufficient, but the complex insurance mechanisms and the lurking legal risks are always there in the dark, gently reminding you: the cost of "DIY" is often more expensive than just paying the bill.

No major American city can provide truly affordable housing to a minimum-wage earner. Under the combined effect of uncertainties like unemployment and illness, the so-called "stable life" is sometimes astonishingly fragile. High living costs and a fragile safety net keep their lives in a state of extremely low fault tolerance. When housing, healthcare, and psychological support all depend heavily on personal savings, and personal savings are below the "kill line," then unemployment isn't just switching to another job.

Then there's the lawn. This is a symbol of the "American way of life" in many Chinese eyes. But if you live in a community with an HOA (homeowners association), the lawn isn't an aesthetic choice but a management requirement.

Don't mow the grass, and you get a warning; still don't mow, and you get fined. You can mow it yourself, but you have to buy a mower, add gas, kit out the tools, make the time. Tally it all up, and you find hiring someone to do it is actually more worthwhile in time and money.

Life in America is like this: in theory you can spend no money, but in reality, the cost of not spending money is often higher.

And so money starts flowing. From your account, toward the repair company, the lawn service, insurance, property management, tradesmen, the supply chain. This money keeps the service sector running, lets companies earn, makes the economy look full of life.

And you?

This is the "aesthetics of circulation" of the American economy: through extremely high labor costs, strict regulatory barriers to entry, and a finely tuned insurance web, the system forcibly severs the possibility of "self-sufficiency."

Money has to flow from your pocket toward the tradesman, the property manager, the insurer, and the supply chain; this high-frequency flow props up society's prosperity and keeps the system's metabolism going. In this logic, the system doesn't welcome saving; it only welcomes you as a "standard part" that works hard and then pays the bill on time.

If you don't consume, this highly specialized system can't run properly. In this society, if you want to save, sometimes even that patch of lawn in front of your house won't agree.

It's not that Americans are born loving to spend; it's that this society spends the money for you. That's why American spending power looks so strong.

Is this a clever institutional design, or a helpless reality of modern society? Or is it a structural bind that looks gentle yet is very hard to break free of?

08 Silicon Valley actually cares a lot about pedigree

People often have a romanticized misreading, imagining that America has no interpersonal games, imagining Silicon Valley as that "heroes not asked for their origins" wilderness, a mythic wellspring where a single spark can set the barren plain ablaze.

But if you walk into that narrow strip of land between mountain and sea, you'll find that Silicon Valley's underlying logic is in fact extremely conservative, even a little "old-fashioned": it not only asks about origins, but its obsession with origins is nearly an institutional compulsion.

Under the filter of social media, founders seem to leap out of thin air as geniuses, raising tens of millions overnight and landing on covers. But in the real Silicon Valley ecosystem, this kind of "spontaneous mutation of species" almost never exists.

(Figure in original.)

First, Silicon Valley is an "acquaintance society" logic born of physical space. Silicon Valley's core zone is only a few dozen kilometers across; top VCs, big tech firms, labs, and universities are crammed together layer upon layer. This produces a high-frequency flow of information and extreme transparency. Here, a person is not an individual but a clearly traceable "chain of data." Ask around a couple of circles, and who your mentor is, what papers you've published and how much they're worth, your performance review at your former employer, even your kids' social circle, will all be reproduced precisely, like code. In such an environment, a "dark horse" with no background and no endorsement is less a delightful surprise than a latent risk brought by "information asymmetry."

Second, this is a screening mechanism that evolved to lower "transaction costs." In Silicon Valley, the scarcest resource isn't capital, isn't technology, but the certainty of trust. When you want to raise money or build a team, no one will simply pay for your dream. What everyone is really looking at is the "tier endorsement" behind you. Silicon Valley VCs like to co-invest not only to share risk but as a social contract of collective endorsement. In this circle, the devaluation of reputation is far more fatal than the loss of capital. This mechanism is like a high-precision filter; it mercilessly filters out the drifters who try to "speculate," and keeps only the "qualified parts" repeatedly verified by famous schools, famous firms, and famous mentors.

So the essence of Silicon Valley innovation isn't the chance eruption of a lone hero, but a "necessity after collective verification."

Behind every shining name, in fact, hangs a dense web of trust woven from historical credibility. You'll find that those so-called "successes" have extremely obvious path dependence: they must have studied at some famous school, spent a few years at some tech giant, done a few failed startups; been spotted by some fund, some mentor, and made their way step by step to today.

Is Silicon Valley a paradise for innovators, or a fortress of elitism? Perhaps both. This mechanism makes innovation extremely efficient, because it greatly lowers the cost of identifying genius; but at the same time it constitutes a "gentle bind" — it makes Silicon Valley a highly closed-loop, gated club. Here, starting a company is no longer an individual's all-or-nothing gamble, but an integrated movement collectively vetted and collectively bet on by the system.

In this circle, reputation is worth more than resources. Behind almost every shining name is a dense network of trust. Starting a company in Silicon Valley isn't an individual act; it's a collective act that has been collectively verified.

09 Closing

The great wizard Dumbledore kept many of us company through childhood, and he had a line that rings so true to me, that speaks exactly to life's bitter passages: "Dark times lie ahead of us and there will be a time when we must choose between what is easy and what is right."

Another is "There is no right way or wrong way, there are only easy way and hard way." Choose the hard right over the easy wrong.

All of 2025's encounters — whether the medals won swimming upstream, or the pleas for help made against the wind — became, in the end, the underlying assets on my personal balance sheet.

2026 — I don't ask for a smooth road, only that in every game I play, I choose that path of "Hard Right."

"Thank you for the glory you've given me — I bow to you, deeply."