Last year, I wrote an article about my experiments with adulting; this year was less experimentation and more discovery. I got surgery (twice), got great at my job, lost my job, found a new one, went to India (twice), traveled the country, made new friends, and reconnected with old ones. I’ve learnt a lot this year and I wanted to continue my annual tradition of writing an article.

I’m still figuring out how I want to structure this article. I would like to think of the last year as a boxing match. In each round, I either won or lost. Maybe the analogy is thin, but I think it’s a useful framing device.

Where we left off last year, I was one month away from getting surgery on my nose. Since birth, I have had trouble breathing, and it got progressively worse as I got older. In last year’s article, I documented in detail my struggles with my health. This surgery was supposed to be the saving grace.

Round 1: vs America’s Healthcare

About a month before my surgery, I slowly started to notice that my hand was hurting and I was losing sensation of it at random times. I would regularly drop my phone or the knife while I was chopping vegetables, or my water bottle. Up to that point, my former employers, Amazon, had not given me a desk to work out of. This meant a constant struggle of working out of cafes and phone booths. This seemed to have put a lot of pressure on my wrists and I was diagnosed with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Thankfully, we caught it early so it would still be reversible. In addition to my surgery now, I would have to go for Occupational Therapy every week to slowly rehab my hand into working condition again. This also meant that I could strongarm (mind the pun) Amazon into giving me a desk.

Eventually, the surgery rolled around, and it was my first time going under general anesthesia. I am very grateful that my dad flew in to help me during the initial few days. The surgery was a fairly complex operation – a combination of five different procedures (Septioplasty, Polyp Removal, Turbinate Reduction, and FESS). I was under the knife for about four hours in total. I was not prepared for how painful recovery would be. I was able to manage when my dad was at home because I didn’t have to cook meals or walk around too much. The day after he left is when the struggle began. Due to Amazon’s fairly draconian paid time-off policies, I couldn’t afford to take any days off, so I worked from home starting the day after the procedure. One day, I had an especially bad sneeze, which caused oodles of blood and mucus to come out of my nose and get on my floor, couch, and laptop. I also lost consciousness when this happened. After I came back to my senses, I slowly cleaned everything up and continued working. The rest of that week was probably the hardest thing I’ve had to experience alone. My nose had over a thousand cuts that would painfully make themselves known whenever I moved too fast, wore my shirt, or wiped my face. One day, I woke up, about 10 days after surgery, and suddenly I felt completely fine. The lethargy, the pain, and the loss of hunger and appetite all wore off.

Slowly, over the summer, with the help of my friend Goli, I was able to start doing things again. I would slowly rest the waters, first going to parks within Seattle, and then slowly start going for trips nearby. Lohit and Shankhin moved to Seattle around this time as well, so our circle was getting bigger and bigger. Slowly, I started going for occupational therapy to fix my hand. Unfortunately, as a result of the surgery, which made pretty abrasive cuts in my throat, I had lost my voice, so I started going for speech therapy as well. As the months passed, I felt my nose had not necessarily gotten better. I was falling sick far less than before; my face felt less clogged, but it wasn’t the huge difference I expected. So I went back to the ENT, who said they may have to do a follow-up procedure. In December, I went under the knife again, and finally, I can say now that my nose is in a much better condition than it was before I fell sick in November 2024. I went to about 36 doctor’s appointments in 2025. I would always be in the waiting rooms with people far, far older than me. Interactions with America’s healthcare system have taught me patience and made me calmer. Because the frustration of feeling something was wrong with your body, but having to wait endlessly to get it fixed, made smaller things that would’ve annoyed me feel less significant.

Round 2: vs Artificial Intelligence

There were weeks where I would be in 10-12 hours of doctor’s appointments. I didn’t want my work to be affected. So I decided I would start using AI to aid me in getting things done faster. This escalated quickly, though, and in a few days, I had 6 CLINE tabs open, getting my work done for me. Around this time, I was also moved into a project with less oversight and quality control. My speed was greatly encouraged, and as I started crushing tasks, I was rewarded with more tasks! Eventually, it started getting absurd, where I’d have so many tasks allocated every day and would be flying through them at an unsustainable, unhealthy speed. But it helped take my mind off the pain that I was going through while recovering from surgery.

My main problem during this time was that I simply didn’t say no to anything. I accepted all the work that I got, and kept finising at a break-neck pace to a point where people would just assign me work regardless of whether they were my manager or not. I saw this as ‘productivity’ and was thrilled by the satisfaction of getting stuff done constantly. This snowballed into me taking way too much on my plate, and there were days when we had our backs against the wall, and I stayed overnight at work to get my tasks done. In hindsight, this did me more harm than good. I set a bar through low quality work that I couldn’t have possibly met with good, high quality work. I learnt that just because I can do something, that doesn’t mean I should do it.

Round 3: vs Amazon

It is difficult for me to talk about this period without sounding resentful, bitter, or salty. I will have to be careful when I narrate my experience because I don’t know what I can get in trouble for sharing. We were developing an AI project at Amazon, one that was determined not to be earning enough. Overnight, they scrapped our project after Q3 earnings came out and decided that we would be moving to our old team. I had a great relationship with my manager thus far. I had rarely received negative feedback. He called me for a one-on-one and laid out a list of things that I had supposedly been doing wrong. Some of those things were either not accurate, not done by me or downright fictitious. I came out of that meeting frustrated and annoyed.

The next few months were torturous. I felt like no matter what I did, or how hard I tried, I would get negative feedback. I was in a mentally contentious position with my manager and I started to feel very demotivated in other aspects of my life as well. I would dread waking up every morning because I would have to go back to work and do some boring, lifeless work and then be criticised for it regardless of its quality. In last year’s article, getting the Amazon job felt like the great escape, the thing that I had wanted for years. Now it felt like a punishment.

Finally, in December, on a road trip to Whidbey Island with some of my closest friends, I told them about what I had been experiencing for the last three months, and they told me, that this could be because they are trying to lay me off. It is hard to describe in words the weight of that realization. In the modern capitalist structure that we find ourselves in, employment is what defines what you do for the majority of the day. There’s a reason at parties, the first question people ask is “Where do you work?” or “What do you do?”. An honest answer to the latter would actually be “I watch movies. I read books. I go to the park. I love to walk. and so on” but unfortunately, we are conditioned to say “I’m a software engineer at Amazon”. For that reality to suddenly not be true anymore. With Amazon having announced that it will lay off 14,000 people in January, I slowly started to accept that come January, I may not have a job.

I took all my PTO and went to India. I spent time with my family, and my close friends. It was incredibly therapeutic. But in the back of my mind, the whole time, I was dreading coming back. I got back on Jan 13th. I was placed on some meaningless project. They moved my office on Jan 25. Made me travel 11 miles (17.7km) for two days. And then on January 27th, they announced they’ll delay layoffs by a day because they are cruel, unfeeling company. On January 28th, 2026, I woke up to a text message that my phone sent to spam that there has been a change to my employment status. Unfortunately, this round I had lost.

Round 4: vs Unemployment

One night I had a job, tasks to complete, deadlines to meet, meetings to attend and the next morning, it was all gone. The first few days went by like a blur, my incredible group of friends was there for me and lifted me through the initial tough period. Lord knows how I would’ve handled that phase if it weren’t for them. By the Friday of that week, I had start building. I figured that Amazon had killed my passion for coding, so if I needed to build it back, I need to do the things that made me love it in the first place.

Whatever ideas for apps or tools that I had been ruminating on, I started build. A Claude Code subscription was very helpful during this time, and I built several projects over the course of the next week. An app to rate your manager similar to RateMyProfessor, an app to Gameify your household chores and tasks, an app to manage our temple in Karandoor, a job board and tracking app. Whatever came to my mind, I built. By that Monday, I had two interviews lined up. I reached out to recruiters at VC funds like a16z and YCombinator. I reached out to every connection I had.

What came next was overwhelming and far more interest than I could have possibly predicted. Over the next two months, I attended 63 interviews at 30 different companies. It was really eye-opening to see how much the tech career market has changed since the last time I was unemployed. I’ve attended every kind of interview possible in these months – typical Leetcode coding interviews, system design interviews, in-person interviews (had a few in Seattle), in-person work trials (flew to San Francisco twice and had a myriad of experiences, doing work trials at four different companies), behavioral rounds, HR rounds. I also made full use of my free time to travel the state of Washington and keep myself engaged, but at some point the grind overtook any desire to chill.

When you have 2-3 interviews every day, it is hard to not be completely focused. My friends were of great support during this time as well, regularly checking in, and making sure we’re hanging out as a group often enough. Despite that, it was incredibly isolating time. When all your friends are going to work everyday, most at the company that discarded you like nothing (despite being one of the top performers on your team), you begin to filled with angst. I just tried my best to channel this angst productively and get out of the situation I was in. Another anxiety I was struggling with was the prospect of having to leave Seattle and move to San Francisco. Until the end of my job hunt, I did not have any leads in Seattle, and I was getting incredible interest from the Bay. It felt inevitable at times that I would have to move there. I had built such a tight-knit circle of friends, and a routine that involved walkability, and just a life here, and I really hated the thought of having to start all over again in a city that was not particularly appealing to me. Thankfully though, I had three offers, two from SF and finally one from Seattle, and I took the one in Seattle because I just didn’t have it in me to leave this beautiful city. In the end, I accepted a position as a Sr Software Engineer at a startup called Crystal POS and so far it’s been pretty good! I feel safe to say, I won this round.

Round 5: vs Food

This is definitely the hardest one to write about. As I started to recover completely from my surgery and was reflecting on my year in the hospital, I felt an overwhelming desire not to have to do that again. I didn’t want to spend my thirties and forties and fifties shuffling between doctors and paying copays. In addition to that, some conversations about my relationship to food made me realize something: I was addicted.

I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t really have any of the conventional vices that you would expect somebody my age to fall into. I have a very addictive personality, and I just don’t want to take that risk. But something that I had never considered was that, food was my addiction. Now this may seem absurd to someone who hasn’t been addicted to anything. It’s easy to think “just ignore it”. I would sit at work, or at home, or at school and think about my next meal. I would think the whole day about a cookie that I wanted to eat. I would plan what social gathering to attend, what work to get done, where to walk etc all based on what I wanted to eat. This never seemed odd to me because I assumed there was something on the biological level that made all humans like this. It took a great deal of conversations with trusted friends to realize that most people are not thinking about a particular food the whole day. Their daily lives, passions and desires are not surrounding their next opportunity to eat Qdoba. I decided to take action.

I’ve done the whole fitness journey many times before. I always found an excuse to fall off the wagon. To go back to old habits. That was because I had never tried to fix the root cause. Instead I always tried to patch around it. I did a lot of study about the science of diets, about the reason to take protein, I learnt how to construct meals that are nutritious and I made sure to keep my indulgences to the weekends. I will not preach my method, because what I learnt is that my method will only work for me. Your method will only work for you. Because I was not trying to do a “fat loss journey”. My goal was to become healthy and have a healthy relationship with food. I had to lose an addiction. I had to rehabilitate. Whether I have won this battle or not is yet to be seen. I think I’m on the right track.

There’s many other new things I did this year: I started taking photos on my Fujifilm X-T5, I travelled to Death Valley, Olympic, Rainier, North Cascades and so many other beautiful places. I’ve been on the house hunt trying to buy a house in Seattle which has taught me so much. I’ve been trying to do new things constantly. These are stories for another article, at another time.

^ These are some of my favorite pictures I’ve taken lately

This year was one of incredible highs and very deep lows. I learnt a lot, maybe more than I ever have, but sometimes I feel like I say that every year. What helped me win the battles I did win was by being relentless. Sometimes you need to have bias for action, and just do the thing. It may not be easy, or comfortable. If you stay complacent or keep doing things that are convenient to you, you’ll get blindsided. Every time I achieved something in the last year, it’s because I stopped thinking of reasons not to do it and honed in on the reasons to do it. Run the extra mile. Take the hard interview. Apply to the unrealistic job. Listen to the band you think you hate. Befriend the person you find detestable. Push yourself. Never let you be the person that stops you from being the best version of yourself. Nobody has achieved anything in comfort. Thank you for watching Arny News!