“Where do you see yourself in 10 years?” This favoured question of unimaginative interviewers and second rate speakers is much more fun when you look back on it. Instead of inquiring about the future, think about the present: Ask yourself where you thought you would be, and compare it with where you are.

I spent my Saturday night talking about mattresses. That’s right. Saturday. Night. Mattresses.

Had I, for example, been bouncing up and down on a mattress whilst having this conversation it wouldn’t have been so bad. Sadly, however, I was at a party having what passes for “fun” in my ever more depressing life.

When I was younger, I thought of my 20s as a golden time. A time filled with promise. A time of whirlwind success and lots of sex. I, and most of peers, thought we would be shaping the world in between celebrity-fuelled drug binges.

Needless to say, things aren’t quite as I had imagined. I’m not actually partying with stars (or partying at all); and, while I’m achieving my lifelong ambition to be a physicist (yes, I know I’m lame), I’m not actually very good at physics.

Personal failings, however, are not what I wish to lament in this week’s lament. Rather it is the ordinary and the common that besets me.

Throughout the past, the underlying notion behind all of my dreams has been that my days would sparkle — against a featureless backdrop the bright glow of glorious triumphs would be the sum of my existence.

In a way this is a universal theme: when contemplating the future we think not of the details, but rather of the larger events that shall come to pass. Whilst this sort of thing is fine for idle reflection, it is not how life actually is.

Life is mundane. Our existence is defined by the trivial minutiae of the everyday. We are not the wild, hedonistic party on the mattress, we are the 20-minute conversation about which mattress we should buy.

The fact that existence comes down to sequences of inconsequential events is, I suppose, not as depressing as one might imagine. For, like all good generalizations, the domination of the insignificant is an absolute Truth. And those troubles that afflict us all are not so much troubles as they are just rules of the game.

Of course, this “everybody’s screwed” principle is a somewhat less than cheery way to look at life. After all, we still have to go through the pain that accompanies one’s realization of the supremacy of the trifling.

It is easy, and common amongst us all during our youths, to maintain the delusion that the past is irrelevant, the present transitory and the future definitive. That delusion is roundly smashed with the passage of time — accumulating more “past” is a sure way to see the hopelessness of the future.

And here (finally) we come to the point. Saturday night discussions of mattresses are not bad in and of themselves. After all, day-to-day life is defined by day-to-day things. What’s upsetting is the gradual realisation that this is all there is.

The rest of my life (and yours) will be filled with the humdrum and the commonplace. All we have to look forward to is, well, more of the same. And given how utterly depressing “the same” is, that’s a terrifying prospect.

Sorry. This whole column was supposed to be a wry look at late night discussions. Somehow it morphed into something of a sadder note. Apologies for that, and I’ll make up for it with a joke if you email navins@stanford.edu.