TL;DR

2024 Reflections

  • 2024 was all about figuring myself out and living with intention.
  • I reconnected with spirituality, cut out toxic relationships, and spent less time on social media—game changers for my happiness.
  • Biggest lesson: Do what makes you happy, not what society says should make you happy.

Content Plan For 2025

  • For 2025:
    • Machine Earnings newsletter drops weekly, all about how AI is changing business.
    • Bi-monthly personal newsletter—expect life updates, random musings, and maybe some fiction.

2024 Reflections

Hello hello! It's been awhile since I've written something publicly. Taking time away from The Internet was refreshing and reenergizing. I spent a lot of my time last year writing, and I have a lot of new, different, writing projects coming out in 2025 that I'm really excited about (fiction!)

I'll get to the professional stuff in a few, but first, I wanted to recap what I learned in 2024, which was a very profound year for me.

I spent a lot of 2024 learning about myself and the world around me. I rekindled my relationship with religion, spirituality, and philosophy, spending a lot of time reading, meditating, and thinking about humanity and our purpose in the universe. I was raised Hindu by pretty religious parents, but I spent the early part of adulthood ambivalent towards religion.

But reconnecting with spirituality brought me a surprising sense of calm and happiness. For the first time, I focused on doing things that genuinely made me happy—not things society says should bring happiness. The biggest takeaway? Your only real goal in life is to prioritize what brings you joy. Everything else matters far less than we think.

Letting Go of Toxic Relationships

I spent 2024 withdrawing from a lot of toxic social relationships, which undoubtedly made me happier. The fact is that, over the last few years, I surrounded myself with people that didn't care much about me but cared more about what I could do for them. I'm a generally helpful person, but that doesn't mean I should be helpful for people who don't deserve it or recognize it. While my social circle is a lot smaller nowadays, the focus on quality over quality in relationships is better for me in the long run.

Social Media and Validation

Less Internet time + fewer toxic relationships = a happier person. None of this should be that groundbreaking, but putting it in practice is a lot harder than you'd think.

This change forced me to take a hard look at my relationship with social media. Reducing my time online revealed how deeply I relied on social validation. I was surprised by how strong my addiction to social media was/is. I'm still surprised by how much I valued social validation throughout my life.

Putting yourself out there online, like I've been doing for 15 years as a content creator, also opens you up to criticism and scrutiny. Whether that's fair or not is one question. But I think that the biggest learning I've had last year is that you essentially come to a crossroads—you can either continue to care what other people think of you and operate from a place of fear and worry, or you can not give a fuck and do whatever you want.

I've lived both—the former for the last few years, and the latter for the last few months. I'll tell you from personal experience that the latter is a lot more freeing. Doing whatever you want may attract some haters, but if there are people waking up and checking my X feed to see what I posted every day, then that's just weird and that's on them.

The Attention Trap

The online world often assumes that creators want massive reach and attention. I used to believe that too—when I was younger, attention seemed like the path to money and power. But as Will Smith famously said (and I'm paraphrasing): "Becoming famous is fun. Staying famous is awful."

Fame in the internet age often means creating attention-grabbing content at the expense of depth or your dignity. While I respect those who choose that path, it's not the life I want.

Living Deliberately

2024 was the year I really understood what mattered to me, why, and how to build upon that. The key is to live deliberately, with intention and finding purpose in everything that you do and everything that happens. It's really easy to go through life waiting for things to just happen to you. But if you wait for that, life will just pass you by. Things don't miraculously happen, it takes energy.

For most of my life, I let external pressures—society, relationships, social media—pull me in directions that weren't my own. But when you live deliberately, you reclaim your agency. You realize that life isn't about chasing someone else's idea of success. It's about creating your own definition of joy and purpose.

As I gear up for 2025, a strong focus for me is to be deliberate about what I'm doing, who I'm doing it with, and why I'm doing it in the first place. Writing things that matter to me, focusing on relationships that are fulfilling, spending my time in ways that feel meaningful. Being present and embracing every situation is an important part of this too. One of the most important quotes I heard last year was Jensen Huang talking about why he doesn't wear a watch:

"Very few people know this, but I don't wear a watch. The reason I don't is that now is the most important time."

It's a short quote but a powerful one, and one that stuck with me (there's a great anecdote about a gardener in Kyoto too…you can watch the full interview here). You can do all the planning and strategy setting in the world but unless you fully embrace the present, none of that really matters.

A lot of this sounds very simple. It is. But living in a noisy world clouds the simplest concepts. I hope that there are some useful takeaways from this. If you ever want to chat/hear more about the random stuff I tried (did not know I'd enjoy the Kundalini Activation Process so much), hit me up.

Content Plans In 2025

On the creating side of things, I'm back to writing a weekly newsletter, or a few. I'll be writing about a bunch of different topics and for different publications over the next year, but I plan on starting off with a few specific projects and scaling up from there:

  • Machine Earnings: Gen AI's impact on the business world—1x/week
    • Machine Earnings is my new weekly newsletter exploring how Generative AI is changing the business world. The more I dig into the space and talk to companies, the clearer it is—almost everything about the way businesses operate will be changing over the next decade.
    • I'll be writing about a lot of different stuff, including:
      • Product & Engineering: when to use RAG, how to implement AI Agents, what AI Agent frameworks to use (if you should use them at all), and new tech advances and what they mean for the average professional.
      • How To's: almost everyone I know has asked me about how to do X, Y, or Z with AI. AI has made me a lot faster—both with executing my ideas and just purely increasing my rate of learning—and I think a lot of people can benefit from it.
      • GTM Strategies: One of the biggest issues for Gen AI startups have is getting distribution. This has been pretty well documented on X but what hasn't been covered is how companies are getting customers and traction, and scaling it.
      • And more!
  • My Personal Newsletter—2x/month
    • Twice a month, I'll share things that matter to me—reflections on life, sports moments, insights from my favorite books and movies, or even snippets of the fiction I'm working on. Think of it as a window into what's inspiring and interesting to me right now.

I'm excited for 2025, and I hope you are too! It's going to be a big year with a lot of changes, and I'm hyped to write about a lot of it.

Thanks for reading,

With much love,

Ian Kar