This year took a great deal away, and in doing so it showed me what was load-bearing. That is a thing you cannot learn any other way.
There is no substitute for having things removed against your will. You can theorise about what matters. You can write it on a card. But you do not really know until the world takes something and you notice, honestly, whether you miss it.
What I found I did not miss, and I say this without cynicism, was most of the apparatus. The travel. A lot of the meetings. The busyness that felt like productivity and was mostly motion. A whole category of the working day simply stopped, and nothing I cared about fell over.
What I did miss, immediately and physically, was people in rooms. Not colleagues in a meeting, but a few specific people doing something in the same place at the same time. And I missed making things with my hands, which I had let become a hobby rather than a need.
That is a fairly brutal audit. Almost everything I would have called a career turned out to be optional, and almost everything I had filed under optional turned out to be the point.
So I am carrying one question out of this year. It is the same one I ask of a website, only turned around and pointed at my own life: what is this for. I do not have all the answers yet. But I know better now what it costs to keep the things that cannot give one back.