Hello reader, happy 2026! Hope you’ve been well.

I’ve been documenting my yearly reflection for at least a couple of years now, and up until now, my reflection has been pretty straightforward: look into the objectives I’d set 365 days ago, see what I achieved and did not, and jot down new objectives for the year. Fairly straightforward. It wasn’t so straightforward to me this time…

Just like always, I was trying to reflect on the past year, and simply looking at the objectives I’d set a year ago felt a bit insufficient, since most of them have been fulfilled but I did not feel like I achieved anything. I had to sit down over multiple days and think long and hard about why I was feeling like I hadn’t done much, and while the obvious reason was there (regarding my career), I realized that there were a few more: a few more that were never a part of my ‘yearly objectives’, but were still important for me to work towards.

I have failed a lot this year, and I’ve envisaged that these failures of mine will teach me more than any objectives I’ll set from here. This post is more of a monologue mulling over my failures - an honest reflection of 2025, both personally & professionally. This is a vulnerable piece, and it was tough for me to write. But very important regardless.

Warm up: Looking back at my 2025 objectives

I had some objectives that I had set for myself for the year of 2025, just like I do with any new year. You can take a quick peek at it here for details, but let me fast-forward through these and elaborate more on the next section.

See? 2025 wasn’t so bad…

Unfortunately, I feel like I’ve made little progress this year in terms of getting my shit together. The objectives above feel nice to write down with some extravagant color effects, and it feels good to learn new concepts + do projects + read papers. Did it take me anywhere? Not really… am I using this as a barometer to call myself a failure?Sounds pretty stupid actually verbalizing it, but I did indeed think this until last week. Over the last week or so when I sat down to actually have an honest conversation with myself, I realized that the reason as to why I felt so negative about 2025 as a whole was not just because I “did not get the job I wanted” (well, that is the primary reason though lol), but mainly due to so many of the decisions I made — or didn’t make — that made me feel so… undistinguished. In other words, as I started jotting down my failures (which I will share below), I felt more and more shameful about just how normal I had become.

This, of course, is a very toxic way to view things.

Failures: crude, honest, strident

Everything from here onwards was the original reflection that I’d done, something that I wasn’t planning to post since I felt very shameful. I was thinking I’d just post the above “2025 Objectives -> PASS or FAIL” content and call it a day. But I felt deeply sick to my stomach keeping this feeling within myself. So dramatic, lol. I felt like a phony. Choosing what to and what not to share based on the kind of image I want to create has never been me on my website, or LinkedIn, or any other social media. So this is my way of talking to myself and also keeping myself accountable in front of the masses by posting this. It wouldn’t feel right to me if I didn’t do this.

Physical health

My sleep seems to have gotten worse, adding to the misery that my quality of sleep has not been good for a long time. Also, I believe that due to my obsession towards my passion, I have failed to prioritize my health in general, and this… is not good.

What does a career or passion matter if I don’t live beyond 40? Why do I fail to take a step back and think about it from a wider, more long-term, picture? Just because it is not blocking my direct view does not mean it is not slowly killing me. It’s almost as if I’m a chainsmoker: it doesn’t show immediate impact, but it’s slowly — but surely — killing me. What’s the difference between what I’m doing to my body to that of smoking? I don’t smoke, but isn’t it pretty much the same if I continue to abuse my body?

Happiness

I generally consider myself happy in life with people around me, but I am extremely unhappy with where I am at work. This has nothing to do with my job content or environment; in fact, I feel incredibly lucky that I even got this opportunity as someone who had 0 computer science experience before this to begin with. I’m just unhappy due to my aspirations and how unrelated they are to the job I’m currently having to dedicate my 50 hours per week to. Just feels like a waste.

Family

My family, which is pretty much just my mom at this point and nobody else, is not in a good state. Mom only keeps getting older, and there’s too much patriarchy and mental trauma inflictions that I cannot untangle her from.

Unfortunately, this was exactly what said to myself last year; seems like not much has changed. I sometimes believe I am the only one who’s sane and the only one who loves my mom, and nobody else in my family even bothers to treat her like a human being. Yet, why is she still suffering? Why does this not change? Is it simply always just “I’ll become capable enough fast so that I can support her more without these restrictions right now”? How on earth are these restrictions going away? Do I just quit everything here in Japan and go back to defend her against the vitriol she has to deal with on a daily basis? How do I financially manage for the two of us if I don’t have enough money (and I, in fact, do not have enough)? Should I find a highly paid remote job and simply work from my country? Easier said than done… Alright, so if I simply just blabber and do not put any action forward, am I even doing anything at all for her? … this is nauseating

Money management

I am in ridiculous amount of debt, and I thought it was going to get better in 2025. It, in fact, got worse. I’m meant to visit my country at least 2x a year too to ensure I can at least be there for my mom more — even if it’s not much — but not having any savings means my hands are tied. Two ways for me to fix this: stop buying anything extravagant at all (especially gadgets) and get a better paying job (more on it soon).

Career

I feel lucky yet cursed to have genuine aspirations — passion — to do specific things in my life.

My current job (a web development role) has nothing to do with what I want to do in my career, i.e., ML R&D ML R&D Machine Learning Research & Development , and I’ve been striving (and failing) to break into a professional machine learning role for a while. As such, I’m not happy with where I am right now at all. I believe I have so much more to give, yet I have not found an environment that demands tough labor and hard work that can truly push me to the limit.

I wish I could find people who wanted obsessively driven beings like myself; there has got to be an environment, a place, a group of like-minded driven individuals that I can be a part of for me to satisfy this appetite for pure learning, grit and toil. Does this count as failure? Not sure… But this burning feeling never goes away. Is this all I am to do? Where are these people? Am I not working hard? No, I can’t work any harder than I already am. Am I not doing the right projects? Not sure, but I understand the bleeding-edge of machine learning tech, and I am reading papers and doing projects almost every single day; I might not be doing too badly here. Am I not good enough? Well… I’m not perfect, but is this not the era where agency agency the capacity to take ownership of your own path: to stop waiting for permission, stop blaming circumstances, and start making things happen instead of letting them happen to you. triumphs everything else? Skills can be easily taught and learned, but the mentality and perseverance is not cultivated readily. Am I just not looking at the right place for people? Probably… What am I doing wrong? Am I presenting myself wrong? Do I need to have 5 papers accepted into NeurIPS? Do I need to have a PhD in ML? Do I need to be a well-polished product to even have a chance at ML R&D? Does ML R&D not even exist here in Japan unless you are the cream of the crop good enough for a company like SakanaAI (given how it seems it’s the only company even doing proper foundational ML research)? … painful.

Mentorship

I was kind of searching for a mentor in 2025, since I wanted to start doing research and write papers. Research in ML is… pretty difficult, especially if you want to discover something novel. I failed to get any mentors that could guide me when it came to research. I’ve been meaning to write at least 1 research paper (or at least start) in 2025; probably an excuse, but I think some form of mentorship could’ve boosted my progress. A lack of mentorship meant I lacked any proper direction, and I’ve been left with a few toy projects and a lot of uncertainty, like some merry-go-round. Times like this make me wonder if I could’ve just gone to grad school.

Then again, I should’ve been more proactive in my approach towards searching for potential mentors. Did I have any concrete research proposals? Not one that I could present to a researcher. Another excuse here, but I probably did not write any concrete proposal because I did not even find myself talking to a ML researcher/professor that could find my stuff interesting in the first place, so I guess things didn’t quite materialize in the first place. But then again, this was simply because I didn’t poke enough; I didn’t search enough. Did I search the professor lists on UTokyo or KyotoU or Tokyo Tech sites? No. Did I search for any research-related roles at universities? No. So what did I do? I did search for research-related jobs, and well… these jobs are extremely rare for Japan, and the ones that get these jobs are, almost every time, PhD candidates/graduates who’ve written multiple papers. I had to learn this in an excruciatingly painful way.

One-dimensionality

This ties it all together. I’ve been too fixated on singular things at a time, such as trying to study or create something (tech tools, etc.) to build myself up for the next stage in my career. I get so fixated that I put my 100% into it and that takes quite a bit of my time. Maybe I could’ve also tried to do some other things in parallel so that I could still have different components to rely on and not just 1? Yes, I’ve “done this” and “built that” but have I also tried networking a little so that I’ve had opportunities to do self-PR? I feel I’ve mainly stayed cooped up in my own apartment for the majority of 2025, just telling myself “no opportunities”, going through LinkedIn in a futile monotonous manner (and btw searching for jobs on LinkedIn is just impossible, I wasted so much time), talking to headhunters who’re only there on LinkedIn for my resume, hoping it would suddenly be different each time, yet I did not quite do things proactively. This was one of my biggest mistakes.

I say this especially because until the start of December, I managed to land 1 interview. In 11 months. However, when I started joining more tech-related gatherings & events in Tokyo and began exchanging contacts + resume, I started hearing back from a lot more. In fact, I currently have 3 applications in parallel right now that have already made it to the interview stage, and they all were due to networking and connections. Not a single application I tried through LinkedIn or company websites were helpful. But now I understand.

Conclusion

I could say I should target this and that for 2026; I could set more “TODOs” and “OBJECTIVES” like I did 1 year ago, but this is pretty much already clear from my failures I just yapped about. Barring my family issue — which I need to still think over deeply & take novel measures — my failures are pretty much telling me what I need to be doing, but more importantly, what I should NOT be doing. Keep dreaming and working hard but please:

• preserve your health
• learn how to save money for yourself and the people you care about
• stop being so stubbornly one-dimensional and have more agency; when something doesn’t work out for 10 months, change the strategy! Just sulking and wanting others to feel bad for you changes zilch… nobody cares.

There’s so much to do and there’s no shortcut here. Let this be a lesson, 2026 me.

fin.