I don’t know if I can do this again. 

We’ve been through this. We’ve been over this. It’s getting to be like “Groundhog Day,” really. I mean, it’s exactly the doggone same. To feel the same expectations, the same excitement, the same disappointments, the same pattern over and over and over like always. 

We don’t really change. We just complain that nothing ever changes. But when faced with the opportunity to do something genuinely different, we humans just stick with the same thing. It is a truism that the only thing people hate more than the status quo is change, and yet here we are. We have “solved” this by having both and neither.

You try to talk yourself into it. Maybe this time it will be different! Perhaps there has been learning! Growth and change! Improvement and insight and innovation! Perhaps lessons were learned from the last go-round that will be applied to this go-round! 

I have bad news for you: The odds are very much against that. We are who we are, and it is very, very difficult to change who you are. We all repeat patterns we aren’t proud of, and humans are in this way no different in groups than on an individual basis. 

Look at what’s going on right now! Yes, it’s early, but do you see any sign that things are getting better? That we have gained any wisdom at all? That we might change over time, with experience, in positive ways? Even just once as a change of pace? 

Me neither. Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? Why do we keep making the same decisions the same ways? I mean, among the many definitions of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly yet always expecting the results to be different, no? And yet we keep running at that football because Lucy absolutely promised that this would be the time she wouldn’t pull it away. 

Are we getting suckered! Do we like to believe? Do we need to do the things we do just to convince ourselves that it’s OK to do the things we were already going to do anyway? 

Think about the last time. Do you really want to do that again exactly? Do you even think you can?

If I’m being honest, I don’t know how much more of this I can take. I’m getting really frustrated just trudging through things that I don’t especially feel good about just because someone else feels it is important. I understand we all have our own views of the Correct Way, and obviously if each of us, individually, were completely in charge, everything would be fine. 

It leaves us all with the same angry feeling, “If only someone would listen to *me*!” We just wind up yelling at the TV and drowning our sorrows. 

I don’t know that this is a healthy way for people to live. 

I know you’re with me. 

You know exactly what I’m talking about. 

Right?