A friend of mine just broke off a 3-year relationship. He'd made some major lifestyle changes and Caroline and I sort of saw it coming. These things are never easy, but in this case it seemed so obvious it was about to happen, we even predicted the date a few months ago, and we weren't far off (it came a little early, but we were pretty close).

The situation reminded me of a conversation I had with my boss Paul a few years back. We were sitting in the office after fixing some kind of problem—a botched deploy, data breach, one disaster or another—I think he said something like, "This stuff doesn't bother me as much as it used to." Curious, I asked, "How else have you changed as you've gotten older?" His answer: "Well, a lot, but fewer things surprise me".

I guess life—"experience"—it's just a training set for the neural network between our ears.