26

For previous birthdays, I'd sized up the year in terms of how much fun I've had, basically. I look back through the birthday blog entries of my early 20s and see now the copious references to alcohol and memory loss, the latter usually following the former in predictable fashion.

But as I turn 26 and am now closer to 30 than 20, perhaps the concept of fun is like pigtails - cute when you're young, but pretty stupid and Nina Yang-like when you're older. It is also true what they say about expectation and emotion regulation. As you get older, you adjust - almost flinchingly - in advance to be disappointed. And so you rarely ever are disappointed, and the deep valleys and peaks of emotion are smoothed into something more manageable without medication.

As I turned the 26th corner of my life, I got a little closer to that sort of emotion-smoothing. And I learnt all the inevitable and predictable things that people promise you that you will learn "when you are older".

What I haven't figured out yet is whether it's normal to desperately want to claw back time - just a little. At what age does a person finally accept that this is it - I will never become anybody, never do anything remarkable, never become incredibly filthy rich? Because everyone but the ones with the most wretched of beginnings earnestly starts out thinking that life will be different for them. That they will beat the odds of divorce and stay happily married, live for longer than the average lifespan of their income group and gender and be part of the 10 per cent of the population holding 90 per cent of the wealth.

At some point, they must accept the finality of the odds that were against them from the start, that they, like most people, belong to the bulky middle of the normal distribution curve. And like the curve is named, they are normal and very depressingly so.

I wonder because I consider myself something of a statistics afficionado - which is to say that I am interested enough to ask the questions but not smart enough to have the answers. And it is beginning to dawn upon me that I belong to the bulky middle of the curve (yes, I know it's obnoxious that I've taken this long to see that).

With each birthday, I have a year less to write that book or run that start-up or to make that sex video. Eventually, I will die and all that will be left of my legacy will be a tapestry of vulgarity-ridden Facebook updates. Not even a blurry video on YouTube.

How do people doomed to normalcy cope with it? And how do they have the courage to be so decidedly ordinary for the rest of their lives? It must verge on the unbearable.

Maybe there's still time to start on that sex video.