[imagesource: AFP]

2021 hasn’t been kind to us.

Three weeks or so left and we can say cheers to this year. I will certainly not be sad to see it go.

Just like us regular folk, multi-multi-multi-billionaires also have years they would rather forget.

Bill Gates, for example, might be worth a cool $138 billion but he’s also keen to leave behind the past 12 months.

Earlier this week he took to his blog and opened up about why he says 2021 has been “the most unusual and difficult year” of his life.

This from Business Insider:

“I know a lot of people are curious about a subject closer to home: my divorce,” Gates wrote in the post…

Gates said he couldn’t deny that “it’s been a year of great personal sadness for me.”

…Gates said having days without any human interaction during the Covid-19 pandemic, was a “strange and disorientating experience.”

Image: The New York Times

He continued: “My personal world has never felt smaller than it did over the last twelve months,” adding that he’s “officially an empty nester” after two of his children recently left home.

“I had stretches of time without any face-to-face social interaction” until getting vaccinated, he said. “If I had a break between meetings, I’d walk around my yard just to see something different.”

Look, that’s something we can all relate to.

The difference is that we’re wandering around a little balcony or courtyard and Bill is taking a stroll at Xanadu 2.0, a 66 000 square-foot complex valued at somewhere upwards of $130 million.

I’m sure having the reasons behind his divorce become public knowledge, like those ‘flirty’ emails he was sending Microsoft employees, didn’t help his morale.

The empty nester comment stems from the fact that Jennifer recently got married and Phoebe is off to college.

66 000 square-foot is quite a nest.

In the emotional post on GatesNotes the billionaire did outline some reasons for optimism, too.

He said he was hopeful that the end of the COVID-19 pandemic is in sight, talked up a promising new HIV preventative called islatravir and progress made in the field of Alzheimer’s diagnostics, and trumpeted a number of clean-energy innovations.

His post finished as follows:

There’s no question that the pandemic will create huge, lasting changes that will take years to fully understand, which can feel scary. One of my favorite authors, Yuval Noah Harari, once wrote that, “people are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes.”

The world has adapted to big disruptions before, and we’ll do it again. In the meantime, I wish you a very happy holiday season.

Almost there, Bill.

Almost.

[sources:businsider&gatesnotes]