In HBO’s excellent series, Six Feet Under, one of the brothers says that life doesn’t get any easier with age and the other agrees saying, no, it just gets more familiar.

Seems to me that is one of the less edifying aspects of experience. Things tend to become ever more familiar and predictable. These days I could virtually write the script for every encounter. And of course it’s often unsatisfactory, unsurprising, disappointing, mundane and ultimately frustrating.

A variation on that theme is when something turns out worse than expected which of course happens too. Very rarely, if ever now, is the reverse of that the case. I can’t recall the last time, it’s so long ago, when an event turned out better than anticipated.

Perhaps as Nate in Six Feet suggested this is just a facet of age as the neural pathways in the brain become fixed in accordance with the patterns of our lives and consequent events.

Or it could be reflective more of an attitude of mind. I’ve remarked before how the negative is far more robust and reliable than the positive and maybe that’s the greater truth here. Good stuff is hard to do, hard to make happen and maintain and so susceptible to falling apart. Giving in to Nate’s argument is taking up a position - a defeatist one.