What’s enough? When are we satisfied? The brilliance of capitalism is that it keeps us motivated—ever creating, ever expanding. Its fatal flaw is that, for many of us, we are never satisfied. There is always more. Just one more thing to make us fulfilled and happy. We even need to hire therapists to confirm that we are content with being content.

As Clint Eastwood said, “Tomorrow is promised to no one.” The world is anything but static. Perhaps we should eliminate our generational demarcations—Z, Millennials, X, Baby Boomers—and just refer to us all as the “Whiplash Generation.”

We have now, all of us, looked into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s eyes and we are troubled by what we see.

I have a special relationship with China, developed over a quarter century of business travel. At one point, my multiple annual visits to Beijing gave me a ringside seat to a metropolis, once known as a “bicycle city,” transforming into a city of eight lane highways and gleaming new Chinese-built automobiles. It is a remarkable country, with Americans still trying to figure out, “How do we compete? How do we co-exist?”

I have always been amazed at the confident abandon with which we use words like “due diligence,” as if we can accurately and fully read and understand every risk — past, present and future. The more information we have, the more surprised we seem to become by endless eventualities.

Each year we produce a Year-In-Review eBook with a theme based on the year that was, filling it with our 50-or-so columns and hundreds of podcasts. 2021 seems to be about learning to live with loss — with nearly 5.5 million people worldwide dying of Covid-19