Writing a review about one’s past year when it’s already September seems crazy. The new year is already more than two-thirds through; why would you be stuck in the past? Still, it’s what I’m about to do. Before I get started, I will tell you why.

I haven’t been actively writing blog posts for a while. In 2025, I only wrote the annual review for 2024 in January and a report from TREEWEEK TWO. In 2026, so far, I have only written one post about social dancing—plus a short TREEWEEK check-in, which wasn’t there when I started this post (actually had to update August to September in the first sentence just now). I had countless things on my mind that I wanted to write about but never took the time to sit down and actually write them. Looking at the big timespan between my last posts and glancing at the 2024 review, I was struck by the feeling that probably nothing happened in 2025 and I’ve just wasted my time. It felt horrible. But just seconds later, I realized that, in fact, many things happened in 2025 (some of which may have been the cause of why I didn’t spend any time writing). It’s likely worth putting them down so I can reference them in the future and remind myself of where I am.

In my 2023 review, I wrote about starting Salsa and Bachata classes. I didn’t mention it again, but I continued in 2024 as well. In those years, I enjoyed a new hobby but felt I wasn’t progressing much. In 2025, I started multiple classes at a local dance school (previous classes were from a freelance teacher) and also went to parties regularly. I realized that once a week wasn’t enough, and if I wanted to become a better dancer and have confidence in my skills, I had to practice more. Moreover, I finally knew enough people in the dance community that I could go to parties assured I’d meet someone I know. So, in 2025, I spent more evenings and weekends on the dance floor, providing me with both physical exercise and socializing. I definitely want to write more about my experience as a social dancer and hope I can find the time soon.

Another thing I started in 2025 was a workout routine. The thought that it’s about time to care more about my body now that my forties are starting coincided with a small local gym aggressively pushing online ads for their “six-week challenge” in my Instagram feed. This small gym isn’t your average commercial gym; it’s a small-group personal training concept. The idea behind small group personal training is that there’s only a small group, in this case a maximum of six people, in the gym at one time, and there’s one coach who will guide them through their training plans. This format has many advantages. You don’t have to care about what to train because the coach makes your plan, and you don’t have to worry about doing exercises wrong because they are there to correct you. It’s much pricier than just a regular gym membership, of course, but it’s obviously cheaper than hiring a personal trainer just for one person. Furthermore, the advantage of being in a group isn’t just sharing the cost for the coach; it’s also that you immediately have a community around you to support you. I took part in the six-week challenge and then decided to sign up for a full membership. Except when traveling, I’ve gone to this gym 3-4 times a week, usually three times for strength training and once for their more cardio-focused conditioning sessions. It’s costly, but I don’t think I would have been able to keep up a workout routine any other way, and I feel the benefits of strength training. I haven’t lost as much weight as I wanted to, but I’m seeing gains in muscle mass and reduced body fat, and I feel better and more confident in my body.

The combination of social dancing, going to the gym, and walking at least 10,000 steps a day works well and makes me feel like I’m taking good care of my body. So “exercise” has been one of my new priorities in 2025. Now I just need to get better with nutrition and lose some weight, which I’ve recently started focusing on.

I’m a member of a local cooperative that supports cultural, creative, and social projects by offering spaces for rent. My first touchpoint with the cooperative was in 2018 when I found their board game nights, started volunteering as a co-host, and later took over when the previous host left town. Then, I started renting a desk in their co-working space. I became the person who spent the most time at this space but had little idea of what was going on behind the scenes, so I gradually got more engaged with the cooperative. In 2025, this led to them asking me if I wanted to become one of their management board, and I agreed. The general assembly voted me in for a 2-year term, which I’m currently in the middle of. The cooperative is a non-profit, and board positions are unpaid, although we pay people for the daily business. We are also supported by public money, and those city funds are always tight. As a board member, I sat in on meetings with local politicians and officials about preventing budget cuts around culture, which was an insightful experience.

The cooperative is also hosting a volunteer initiative that runs a vegan café on a donation basis, meaning it’s pay-what-you-want. The community space is right next to the coworking space, and, at first, it was just an opportunity to eat a piece of cake and have a little chat during breaks at work. Similar to how I got deeper into the inner circle of the cooperative simply by being there, the same thing happened with this initiative. I went to their meetings first as a connecting person between them and the cooperative. I then saw they had a difficulty attracting volunteers to fill their shifts and agreed to support a bit with Friday late shifts after work. This happened mostly in 2024, but in 2025 I became more of a regular on the team. That included covering a few shifts, but the initiative also runs events. Another team member and I started a new event that we called “campfire night,” which had nothing to do with an actual fire but encapsulated the idea of coming together to sing songs—as one might do when sitting around a campfire with friends and someone brought a guitar. We ran this three times in 2025, two regular editions and one special Christmas edition.

Which brings me to the overlap between dancing and this initiative, because one of the other active members is also a dancer. She came up with the idea of running a Salsa and Bachata party in the community space. I immediately agreed that this was a great idea, and we had a very successful first workshop and party in 2025, which we then turned into a regular series in 2026.

A few paragraphs ago I said that “exercise” was a focus in 2025, but as you can see, so were “volunteering” and “community building.” And the things mentioned above weren’t even all I did. I also started working in another volunteer-run café that provides a hangout spot for people who don’t want to be alone on a Saturday night. For our target audience, going out wouldn’t be possible because of noise, exposure to alcohol, or simply because of affordability. We provide a chill hangout spot and sell non-alcoholic drinks for as cheap as we can. I already knew the organization behind this café, saw they needed help, and thought there was very little collision on late Saturday nights.

In 2023, I wrote about intercultural exchange and my observation that Germans and foreigners don’t mix as much as I think they should in a society that doesn’t want to consider itself racist. I thought of ways of changing that and tried using the board game night as a vehicle. Since I never published the promised update on the blog, here it goes: I did a one-time project with a nonprofit that, among other things, works with refugees and asylum seekers and provides a buddy program for them. The idea was to invite them to my regular events (located in a space of the cooperative I mentioned above). It was successful as a one-time run, but it didn’t stick, and I hardly saw any of these guests again at future events. In 2025, I got another opportunity to run an intercultural event. A new friend I made at the end of 2024, who moved to my hometown as an exchange student from Delhi, came up with the idea of a multilingual poetry event. He ran this idea by me and another friend, and together we refined it into a concept called “Words of the World.” Because of my connection with the cooperative, I agreed to take care of the logistics of the venue. We ran our inaugural event in June 2025, and it was a huge success, so we did a follow-up edition in October. I will share more about the poetry event in another dedicated post or in a 2026 review because it’s still ongoing. I’m super happy that I found something that works to support intercultural exchange in my city, and I hope I can expand from here.

In 2025, I traveled thrice, not counting two business trips to Vienna, where my major client is located. I joined Coworking Island Life in Ikaria, Greece, for the second time. This time, I also added a day in Athens, which I had only passed through in the previous year. Then, as one of my friends stayed in Glasgow, Scotland, for an academic exchange summer, I visited him there. What was special about that journey was that it was a complete railway trip, with no flights involved. From my home, I traveled on high-speed trains via Frankfurt, Brussels, London, and Newcastle upon Tyne (to be honest, part of the onward trip to Newcastle included a rail replacement bus). I added a bit of a stay in London on both sides of the Scotland part and explored more of the British capital. Then, I went to TREEWEEK TWO. The time between the UK trip and TREEWEEK was only two weeks, and it felt like I had strained myself a bit with travel and came back with the thought of slowing down and being more locally grounded.

I first met [Jacob Huber of Revolutionary Character](https://www.revolutionarycharacter.com/ at an Interintellect online salon. In 2025, he invited me to an online catch-up call. It was around the time I was first in touch with the gym I’m now frequenting. We spoke about it on the call, and Jacob stressed the importance of physical exercise as a first step to self-improvement. He literally said that he’d rather want me to pay for the gym first rather than him for coaching. It was a well-placed boost, and I can certainly give kudos to Jacob for helping me establish the gym routine. But some of my money went to him as well in the end; I joined a cohort of his Unstoppable group coaching program, which was quite insightful.

If you’ve read until here, you might think that everything about my year was completely and utterly amazing. But that’s not the whole truth. For example, I barely spent time at home while continuously moving between my coworking space, the community space, the gym, and various dance floors. Practically no noteworthy moment of 2025 happened within the confines of my home. The house was also not a good place to stay in. Practically all year it was a complete mess. I happened to tidy the living room just once for guests, and the bedroom remained in a horrible condition. In 2024, I hosted three “two-hour parties” and wanted to continue with this event format, but all the hosting I did in 2025 was events in the community space. Partly this had to do with shifted priorities, but it was also due to my inability to make my home guest-friendly. I managed to make a rough cleaning of the living room once to host guests, but my bedroom collected a shameful amount of dust.

In April, I went to the Entrepreneur University Founder Summit in Wiesbaden. I returned full of motivation and also some new contacts to reach out to and a potential coaching partner to move my business forward. However, you may have noticed that, besides maybe Jacob’s program that was about personal improvement, also with the idea of improving work, none had to do with work or building a business. I mostly continued working on my existing client projects, occasionally thinking about business development but not really taking action.

In a way, the things I did and the things I didn’t do may show revealed preferences that conflict with stated preferences. For example, I may—at least for now—value community work higher than expanding the business as long as the bills are getting paid. That would be the most generous interpretation. A less generous interpretation is that I’m running away from the hard things. Always being on the move means I don’t have space to think about the questions I should be thinking about. Valuing instant gratification and a unique brand of hedonism (that includes no drugs or sex but often actual but unpaid work) over long-term goals and building something. Which is also a revealed preference, but probably not one to accept that easily.

I don’t have a conclusion at the moment. I wasn’t looking for one in the scope of this post anyway; my goal was to have a record of my activities and non-activities of the past year to build upon. Furthermore, I hope that, if you’ve read up until here, you have gained some understanding of what I’ve been doing.