Ross Sutherland is a poet and playwright and an all-around gorgeous madman. He has this podcast called Imaginary Advice and the “Sutherland Dunthorne Luck Index” is my favorite episode. There’s a running gag among his friend group that whenever something good happens to his friend fellow writer Joe Dunthorne, something bad happens to Ross. And so they devise a test to determine whether this is true. They go to a casino together. And sure enough, Joe wins some money and Ross loses all of his money. Theory proved! But then they talk about what happened in the casino. Ross asks Joe why he cashed out when he did, and Joe says it was because he’d won some money. He cashed out not because he was financially prudent but because he’d achieved a sort of narrative completeness: man goes to casino, plays cards, wins money, the end. Ross, on the other hand, had been up and down throughout the night, too, but he didn’t stop playing. Not because he loved gambling but because, he sort of realizes as he’s talking about this, the story of the night couldn’t quite seem over to him until he’d lost all his money.

It had nothing to do with luck. It had to do with what kind of story expectations they were carrying around inside them. For Joe, the story he was in didn’t feel over until something good had happened. For Ross, only losing everything could feel like the end.