At this point of first stepping into working life, I want to look back a little and also leave a few wishes for the future.

Anxiety, overthinking, and not knowing what to do

If I had to give this year a theme, it would be this: anxiety, internal friction, confusion, and doing almost nothing in spite of all that.

What does internal friction feel like? It is getting stuck on problems you cannot solve, circling them again and again without reaching any answer, draining your own energy in the process. You do not have the courage to break the problem down, and you do not have the resolve to act either. In the end, you are left mentally and physically exhausted, without even truly touching the edge of the problem itself.

2025 is my first year entering society. After graduating from a mediocre third-tier college and then spending two and a half years in a gap period, I have to face reality again, almost the way I did back in school.

But now the road is no longer one-dimensional. The problems themselves are vague, and you are forced to choose one path out of many. No one teaches you which road to take. No one can tell you whether effort will be rewarded. No one can tell you what the future will look like. You can only keep moving with whatever resources you already have in your hands.

There were a few days this year when I was so anxious I could barely sleep. I would lie in bed with my eyes closed, thinking for hours until dawn. I regretted the laziness of my past, felt helpless about the present, and still had to stare at a future that looked completely unclear.

Sometimes I even find myself missing secondary school a little. Back then people called it hell, and I was only an average underachiever anyway. But after evening self-study in summer, walking home in the night breeze, I carried a strange sense of safety inside me. Once I got home, I could listen to music, flip through a book, and do whatever I wanted for a while. There was only one immediate goal, and the college entrance exam still felt far away. I still want to sit on some steps on a summer night in Northeast China and just feel the wind again.

Now the question is different. Do I choose a path that demands long-term commitment, with high risk and high reward? Or do I choose the one with low investment and low return?

If I choose the second, then maybe all the fantasies I once had about the future stop right there, and even then the future will still remain unpredictable.

If I choose the first, then what happens if I fail? And even if I succeed, what kind of market will I be facing by then?

Each year feels smaller, while time moves faster

Back in middle school and high school, every year felt like a major change. When I looked at the things I had done or the way I used to think, I would almost want to curse my old self for being stupid.

From pseudocode, to simple scripts, to complete little projects, I was climbing one step at a time, year after year, becoming someone new each time. Back then, I believed it without question: the future version of me would definitely become one of those brilliant technical people who seemed to glow.

But after entering university, the scale between one year and the next somehow disappeared. No stair steps, no leaps, just a vague feeling of “that was only last year.” Where did that version of me go—the one who was always improving, always getting brighter?

Grand fantasies for the distant future, no plan for the near one

I am very good at drawing a magnificent blueprint for the distant future, and completely powerless when it comes to planning a concrete path for tomorrow.

My abilities are thin, but my ambitions always run high.

I daydream endlessly about an unknown future, yet I have almost never made a real one-year or two-year study plan for myself. I only start reviewing when the deadline is already at my throat. I never buy tickets in advance.

The most absurd example is that it was only on the very day of my high school entrance exam that I truly realized the paper had a fixed question structure and format, rather than being some random combination of problems.

Last winter, in order to make a break with that dazed and drifting version of myself, I bought a road sign: No Parking. It became a kind of personal spiritual symbol for me.

When I came to Beijing for my internship, I had it mailed over as well. If nothing unexpected happens, I will probably keep carrying it with me.

It is there to remind me that I should never stop, and that I should keep improving without limit.

Too many ideas, almost no follow-through

From the moment I first got into computers, what attracted me was development itself, not algorithms or anything like that. I have always had ideas—sometimes interesting little concepts, sometimes small tools that could improve efficiency—and those ideas are what pushed me to learn development in the first place.

I want to learn development, graphic design, video production, 3D modeling...

But my laziness always drags everything out. Projects stop at the “new folder” stage. Articles never get published. I wanted to make videos back in 2018 and still did not really do it. As for 3D modeling, I only got as far as

hello world

Some projects did achieve a little success, but once they satisfied my own desire for fun, they stopped growing.

Those ideas just lie in my notes and task lists. Every now and then I pull them out and daydream over them again, or I let them slowly be forgotten.

From my own perspective, I think of myself as someone creative, someone with taste. But in other people’s eyes, I am just one among countless others, because I have never actually produced a complete project.

I often look down on what other people make and think that if I were the one doing it, I could do it better. And yet I do nothing.

Done really matters more than perfect. Don’t let your TODO list become an empty nest for abandoned plans.

Now that AI has arrived, though, it feels like some of these problems might finally improve. gemini3 is out, and coding ability has become much stronger.

Big companies really do have it good—they are chasing front-end people hard. But looking at it from the other side, as technical barriers get lower, I finally have the ability to quickly turn the ideas I have hidden in my head into something real. Only now do I realize how close I already am to the original reason I got into computers at all: making products.

My autumn recruiting season went very badly. Obviously, I had not planned well.

Maybe I really will not make it into a major company. The root problem is still the same: no planning. Or maybe the door to big firms really is that hard to knock on. But honestly, a small company is fine too. I just hope I can recover that sense of inner steadiness I had back in school, and focus on creating for its own sake, even without some grand ideal.

At the very least, I need to keep moving upward. If I keep going up, then I am still going up. Maybe the results are no longer one-to-one with effort, but at least I will not be moving backward.

I hope I can find the version of myself that never becomes ordinary, the one that never stops moving forward.