Preface
Back in 2019, I came across a line that felt almost prophetic: this may be the worst year of the past decade, but it may also be the best year of the next decade. At the time, I did not fully grasp how heavy that sentence was. Looking back from the end of 2024, it feels even more accurate than it did then.
With the economy slowing and entire industries reshuffling, very few people have had an easy year. Layoffs have become common, unemployment is more visible, and many things are simply beyond the reach of individual effort. This is not a problem one person can solve by trying harder. It is a difficult period stretching across industries and society as a whole.
For me personally, 2024 felt strangely frozen. In many areas, almost nothing changed, and there was little to call impressive. But in such an uncertain environment, maybe that lack of change is a kind of luck in itself. It means there was no breakthrough, yes, but also no collapse. If nothing else, I managed to hold my ground.
I suspect that is how many ordinary people feel right now. We cannot control the larger currents, but we can still try to live our lives well and make whatever changes are within our reach. I have neither the ability nor the desire to tackle grand social questions here. What matters more to me is figuring out how to live coherently in uncertain times, how to keep growing anyway. So I chose to document my own year. Recording things is, in its own small way, a resistance to time and to meaninglessness. Even an uneventful year deserves to be taken seriously and written down with care.
So this is my record of 2024.
Work
Work first.
This year brought me into contact with several new challenges and unfamiliar areas, which I count as a good thing. I have never wanted to become the kind of person who repeats one year of experience ten times over. Continuous learning and growth still matter to me. But the pressure of the larger environment reached my company too, and the steady trickle of layoff news left everyone feeling helpless. When you are in the middle of that, there is not much you can do except keep doing your job well and keep making yourself more valuable.
Even so, one small incident at work stayed with me.
A colleague once asked whether I had any useful tools to recommend. It may have been a casual question to him, but it struck me more deeply than he probably realized. In that moment, I suddenly became aware that, in someone else’s eyes, I had already become the kind of person who knows how to use tools to improve efficiency. That gave me a faint sense of pride, but also a little embarrassment. The question caught me off guard. I fumbled, gave some vague answer, and moved on.
Afterward, though, I decided I should sit down and properly organize the tools I use. Not just to answer that colleague’s question, but also to take stock of my own habits. That eventually led me to write a separate piece listing the tools I used in 2024 from A to Z.
There are many moments like this in everyday work. If you pay attention, even very small things can feed you in unexpected ways. When you stay in a job long enough, monotony is almost unavoidable, and enthusiasm wears down bit by bit. That is why I think we need to actively look for things that can still light a spark inside us, things that keep giving us a sense of satisfaction. That satisfaction does not come only from finishing routine tasks. It comes from a fuller inner life, from doing something that feels meaningful, something that genuinely improves yourself or helps someone else.
Learning, or Something Like It
If I were being strict, I would have to admit that I did not do much formal learning outside of work this year. But I would not say I wasted the time either. A lot of my energy went into various forms of tinkering. And who is to say that this kind of seemingly unproductive fiddling is not just another way of learning?
Building a Digital Family Genealogy
During Qingming this year, I went back to my hometown to visit family graves. At home, the elders were talking about previous generations, and I found myself flipping through an old, yellowing family genealogy. A thought came to me immediately: among people of my generation, how many have actually read this book or know anything concrete about the lives of our ancestors?
A paper genealogy is precious, of course, but it is often stored away, difficult to consult and inconvenient to update. Times have changed. A digital genealogy may be a better way to preserve family memory.
I wanted to contribute something in my own way. Part of that comes from an interest in history, and part from a sense of respect toward those who came before us. After all, everyone eventually becomes a handful of earth. We honor our ancestors year after year, but how many descendants can still say their names or tell even a little of their story? The power of history lies precisely in the fact that it preserves traces of once-living people, so they are not erased completely by time.
By digitizing the genealogy and creating short biographical entries for each ancestor, I hoped I might spark some curiosity in younger family members. Even if not everyone responds to it, at least it fulfills something important for me personally. More than that, I hope my own descendants will one day be able to look at it and know where they came from.
Of course, I cannot write full biographies for every ancestor the way a great historian might. Most of them were farmers who lived ordinary lives. In many cases, all that survives is a name, dates of birth and death, marriage information, and burial location. But once those fragments are linked together, they form a long historical scroll of the family. They are enough to prove that these people truly lived.
The process itself taught me a lot. I learned more about surname origins, ancestral hall designations, geographic distributions, and the broader practice of tracing family roots. I also came to appreciate just how much work goes into compiling a genealogy. It is not simple data entry. To write even a short account of an ancestor’s life, I often had to compare records from different sources, weigh what seemed reliable, reason through inconsistencies, and sometimes even consult local county gazetteers to reconstruct the social setting of a particular period.
Some dates and lineages may never be fully verifiable. But I still hold to the belief that success does not have to happen in my generation alone. All I can do is preserve what is available now and leave room for later generations to continue the work. This experience gave me a small glimpse of the enormous effort historians invest when trying to establish something as basic as a person’s birth or death year. It also strengthened my determination to keep working on this digital genealogy carefully and seriously.
Losing Interest in Games, and in Tinkering Too
People often use the phrase “electronic impotence” to describe losing interest in video games. As far as games go, that stage came for me a long time ago.
When I was younger, I was the kind of kid people would have called internet-addicted. Skipping class to spend time at internet cafés was nothing unusual. But somewhere along the way, my enthusiasm for games faded without much ceremony. I remember that after I started working, colleagues would spend breaks happily playing on their Switch consoles, while I felt absolutely no urge to join.
Running parallel to that was another obsession of mine: tinkering with electronics. If gaming was one hobby of my youth, flashing firmware was another. Back when devices were limited, my phone was my best toy. I threw myself into learning about flashing ROMs, recovery tools, and unbricking methods. Terms that meant nothing to the people around me felt strangely magical to me. Later, once I had access to more hardware, I did the same thing with phones, computers, routers—if a device could be reflashed, I wanted to mess with it.
One memory from school remains especially vivid. I was preparing for a city-level competition that involved configuring Cisco networking equipment. Acting on pure tinkerer instinct, I decided to upgrade the firmware on a wireless AP in the lab. It went badly. I bricked it.
At the time I was terrified and honestly worried I might be expelled, so I did not tell the teacher. It was a Friday afternoon, and I went home carrying an absurdly heavy sense of dread. That entire weekend I could hardly eat or sleep. I buried myself in forums searching for a solution. Fortunately, after enough trial and desperation, I eventually found a way to recover it. The moment I got back to school, I ran straight to the lab and managed to bring the AP back to life.
Anyone who likes this kind of tinkering has probably experienced some version of that emotional cycle. The process is always full of challenge, and often includes painful failures. But when you finally solve the problem, the satisfaction is hard to match.
And yet, over the past two years, even this passion has cooled. I still tinker sometimes, but compared with how I was when I was younger, the enthusiasm is clearly diminished. For example, I had set up a Synology-like DIY NAS before, and after one of the drives failed, I left it unresolved for a very long time. For a while I thought that, just as I had lost interest in gaming, I had also lost interest in electronics.
This year, after taking advantage of a subsidy program, I bought a new TV for my place. Watching YouTube on it turned out to be inconvenient, which made me consider getting a more flexible router. After comparing options, I bought a Redmi AX6000. Once it arrived, I immediately flashed OpenWrt onto it, only to find the network speed extremely unstable. I tried two or three different firmware versions, but the problem never went away. In the end, I gave up and restored the stock firmware.
Luckily, the official firmware was still enough for what I needed, so I settled on enabling persistent SSH and installing ShellClash. That whole router adventure gave me back a little of the old enjoyment, but it also made one thing clear: when I was younger, I loved tinkering for its own sake. Now I mostly want the simplest and most efficient solution.
When you are young, you have time and energy to burn, and even pointless experimentation can feel joyful. As you get older, family, work, responsibility, and pressure begin filling up your days. Time becomes more precious, and without even noticing it, you become more cautious. I do not think that is necessarily a bad thing. The important thing is finding the right balance between tinkering and not tinkering—somewhere you can live comfortably without losing the courage or the ability to experiment.
Life
Finally Appreciating iOS Automation
iOS automation—Shortcuts, in other words—has been around for years. But it was only this year that I started to feel how practical it could be in daily life.
Here are a few automations I use regularly.
Clocking In and Out for Work
A few years ago, I had already started experimenting with using iOS Shortcuts to automate check-ins through WeCom. My first approach was to tie it to my commute alarm so that turning off the alarm would trigger the action. But that setup was unreliable because commuting times were not always stable, and manual confirmation could break the flow.
Later, I changed tactics. Instead of depending on the alarm, I made it so that connecting to or disconnecting from the company Wi-Fi during a certain time window would automatically open the WeCom attendance page. That version turned out to be surprisingly stable, and since then I have not missed a check-in.
Parcel Pickup Reminders
After work, picking up packages used to be more annoying than it should have been. I would scroll through text messages trying to find the pickup code, and sometimes I even had to open shopping apps just to retrieve it. It was tedious every single time.
So I built an automation: whenever a text message contains words like “package,” it automatically extracts the pickup code and adds it to my reminders. I also added another trigger so that every time I tap out on public transit, the reminder pops up automatically. That small tweak made parcel pickup much easier.
Auto-Copying Verification Codes
That package-reminder idea also gave me another one.
Whenever a text message containing a verification code arrives, an iOS Shortcut now extracts the code and pushes it to Bark on my Mac, where it is copied directly to the clipboard. So instead of reading the code, remembering it, switching devices, and typing it manually, I can just paste. It cuts out all the in-between steps.
Other Small Things
There are plenty more examples: automatically turning alarms off on holidays, enabling low power mode when the battery drops, and similar little routines.
Each one seems trivial on its own, but together they noticeably improve the texture of daily life. That feeling—using technology to simplify little frictions and solve ordinary problems automatically—is one of the most concrete ways modern tools can make everyday happiness feel more accessible.
A Few Favorites From the Year
Favorite Software
On macOS
I have described myself more than once as a heavy RSS user. I am deeply attached to the idea that almost anything should be subscribable by RSS. I have even fantasized about a world where WeChat Moments could be followed that way.
So when Follow appeared as a sort of all-in-one RSS reader, I immediately started trying to get an invite code from anyone I could find. Recently I learned that it has begun testing a mobile version through TestFlight, and I am genuinely looking forward to it potentially becoming my favorite iOS app next year.
On iOS
This year I replaced Shadowrocket, which I had used for quite a long time, with Quantumult X. I did not expect the switch to be such a pleasant surprise.
Quantumult X is not only powerful when it comes to blocking ads; it is also extremely flexible. It supports all kinds of automation scripts, which means you can customize a lot of behavior to suit your own needs. I even wrote a few auto-check-in scripts myself. Looking back, this was easily the software purchase I felt best about all year.
On TV
I have loved movies since I was little. Years ago, to satisfy that appetite, I set up a DIY NAS as a downloader and let it run around the clock until the hard drive eventually died under the strain. Later I stored movies on cloud storage and built an Alist setup, but if I wanted a nice poster wall, I still had to scrape and organize everything manually, which was a huge hassle.
Then a friend introduced me to an Emby public server, and it felt like a whole new world opened up. Most of the movies I want to watch are already there, complete with well-organized metadata and polished poster walls. No more unnecessary setup work, and the viewing experience improved dramatically.
Favorite Film
For a while, I assumed The Pig, the Snake and the Pigeon would be my film of the year. Then, near the end of the year, The Last Dance, starring Dayo Wong and Michael Hui, came out.
By coincidence, I was actually in Hong Kong on the day of its premiere—but somehow forgot all about it. Even now I want to scold myself for that. I had assumed the film might never make it to mainland theaters, so when a December release was finally announced, I bought a presale ticket immediately.
I do not need to spend much time arguing for the film’s quality; its box office performance speaks for itself. For me, part of the excitement was simply seeing Dayo Wong and Michael Hui, two actors I have liked since childhood, share the screen. Dayo Wong in particular is the only male celebrity I have ever truly considered an idol, and seeing where his career is now makes me sincerely happy.
Beyond that, the film tackles a subject Chinese-language cinema rarely approaches directly: death and the funeral trade. I think anyone who has gone through the loss of a relative and followed the entire funeral process will feel something very immediate when watching it.
Favorite TV Series
Not long ago, news about the second season of Day and Night seemed to be everywhere. The funny thing is that I had never even seen the first season. So I went back and watched the original 2017 series, and once I started, I was hooked. I binge-watched the whole thing.
But the long-awaited sequel turned out to be full of disappointments. After just one episode, I had no desire to continue.
That is hardly unusual. Sequels failing to surpass their predecessors is almost a rule at this point. You can see the same pattern in the mixed reception to recent second seasons of other major shows.
Favorite Song
One day this year, I happened to hear a couple singing “Pian Ai” together in a public square. I had heard the song before, but for some reason it landed differently that day. After that, I put it on repeat and never seemed to get tired of it.
Looking Back, Looking Ahead
Real growth may simply be learning how to make peace with life, and finding a way to live vividly even in ordinary days.
2024 is almost over, and a new year is about to begin. I hope I can keep hold of what I still love, and not let myself down. And I hope the same for everyone else too: a happy new year, all the best, and above all, sleep well and live well.