Year-end reviews and other pointless conventions

Posted on: 30 December 2025

At year's end, people take stock. It's one of those conventions everyone follows without asking why. You sit down, look back, list successes and failures, draw lessons, make resolutions. Then you start again.

I've never found it particularly useful. Not out of cynicism, but for a simpler reason: what's done is done. Putting it in a list doesn't change it, doesn't improve it, doesn't make it more comprehensible. The patterns that matter, you recognise while you're living them, not in December when you decide it's time to take stock. And if you didn't see them while they were happening, you're unlikely to spot them looking back with tired end-of-year eyes.

There's something artificial about slicing time into annual portions and expecting each slice to make complete sense. Life doesn't work that way. Patterns cross years, overlap, interweave. Some you recognise after months, others after decades. Some you'll never recognise at all.

So no review of 2025. What I can do instead is share a couple of things I noticed this year. Not because they're lessons, but because they made me think.

Veterans and tourists

I take a flight every week. Sometimes more than once. It's part of the work, part of the life I've chosen, part of that double existence between Lugano and London I've built over time. I don't say this to boast, I say it because it's necessary context for what comes next.

When you travel this often, you develop a series of automatisms. You know exactly what to put in your hand luggage and how to organise it to get through security without stopping. You know which queues are faster, which gates have power sockets, which lounges are worth it and which are tourist traps. You know how to dress to be comfortable without looking like you're heading to the beach. You know when to arrive, where to position yourself, how to move.

Small optimisations accumulated over years of flights. Nothing revolutionary, just experience crystallised into habits.

The problem is the system doesn't know this. Or rather, it doesn't care.

Every time I go through security, I'm treated as if it were my first time. Belt off. Shoes off. Laptop out. Liquids in the transparent bag. Instructions repeated in that patient, slightly condescending tone used with children or people who don't understand.

And around me, families flying once a year to go on holiday. With oversized cases, liquids in the wrong place, the bewildered air of people who don't know where to go. They slow everything down, block the queues, ask obvious questions. And there I am, waiting, wondering why the system doesn't distinguish between those who do this every day and those who do it once a year.

The pattern beneath the irritation

For a while I thought it was just irritation. The normal reaction of the expert towards the inexpert. Frequent flyer snobbery, nothing more.

Then I began to see the broader pattern.

The airport system is designed for the lowest common denominator. It assumes everyone is a first-timer, everyone needs the same instructions, everyone represents the same level of risk. It's an understandable design choice: simpler to treat everyone the same than create differentiated pathways. Safer to assume ignorance than trust experience.

But the cost of this choice falls on those who've accumulated competence. The veteran is treated like the novice. Experience doesn't count. The automatisms you've developed are useless when the system forces you to follow the standard protocol anyway.

It's the same pattern you see in many other contexts. Business processes designed to prevent mistakes by the less capable, which end up slowing down the more capable. Rules conceived for worst cases, applied to everyone indiscriminately. Bureaucracy that doesn't distinguish between those who know what they're doing and those who don't.

It's not an easily solvable problem. Creating systems that recognise and reward experience is complicated, expensive, open to abuse. Easier to level down. But the cost exists, even if you don't see it on the balance sheet.

The veterans' tricks

The interesting thing is that veterans find ways to navigate the system anyway. They don't change it, they work around it.

You know which airports have faster security and organise trips accordingly. You know which airlines have more reasonable policies and prefer them even when they cost more. You know which credit cards give you access to which lounges. You know how to speak to staff to get what you need without seeming arrogant.

These are forms of invisible capital. Knowledge you won't find written anywhere, accumulated only through experience, creating a real but unquantifiable advantage. The tourist doesn't even know they exist. The veteran uses them without thinking.

It's a microcosm of how the world works. Formal systems treat everyone the same. Informal systems reward those who know how to move. True competence isn't knowing the rules, it's knowing how to operate despite the rules.

The double life that works (perhaps)

This year I also understood something about my situation. This life split between Lugano and London, these weekly flights, this sensation of never being completely in one place or the other.

It works. In the sense that it keeps going, produces results, keeps me busy. But I've started wondering whether it works for the right reasons.

There's a difference between doing something because it makes sense and doing something because it keeps you occupied. The second option is more insidious because it resembles the first. You're productive, you're in motion, you always have something to do. But if you remove the activity, what's left?

And then there's the other question, the one I perhaps don't really want to answer.

This double life, this never being in one place, is it a professional choice or something else? Am I keeping someone at a distance? Or keeping at a distance the very possibility of finding someone? Is it a way of making a real relationship structurally impossible, and therefore not risking disappointment? Or is it a test, perhaps unconscious, to see if sooner or later I find someone willing to keep up with me despite everything?

I don't know. Probably a bit of all these things together, in proportions that change depending on the day. The beauty of patterns is that you see them clearly in others, in organisations, in systems. When it comes to yourself, vision clouds over. Motivations overlap, blur, hide behind comfortable rationalisations.

Perhaps some of the things I do I could perfectly well not do. Perhaps perpetual motion is a way of not stopping to think. Perhaps the double life is a structure I built for reasons that are no longer today's. Or that were never the ones I told myself.

I don't have an answer. It's not the kind of question that gets resolved at year's end with a nice resolution. It's more an awareness that made its way slowly, between one flight and the next, between one city and the other. One of those questions content simply to be noticed, as I said at the start.

What remains

I have no lessons to offer. No five points for better travel or three secrets for a more authentic life. Just scattered observations, patterns glimpsed in passing, questions without answers.

The year-end review remains a convention that doesn't belong to me. But perhaps this, in a sense, is my way of doing it: not looking back to judge, but noticing what's been noticed. Without pretending it makes complete sense, without forcing a narrative that isn't there.

The papers on the desk remain scattered. Not everything needs to be put in order. Some patterns emerge precisely from disorder, from random juxtaposition, from not yet knowing what goes with what.

We'll see what 2026 brings. Or rather: we'll see what we notice while we're living it.