The slow, inevitable death of my fandom, I guess. It's been such a big part of basically my whole life, it's not something I can, or even want to just shrug off easily. But more and more it's becoming clear to me that this org brings me more frustration and negative feelings than positive ones, and that shouldn't be the case, especially having seen so many terrible, terrible seasons (in terms of baseball being played). I have been kicking this around in my head, and I think part of it is where the Cubs are in their competitive cycle. Even if I abstract away the off the field stuff, and even if I set aside that the increasing blurnsball-ization of the game isn't my favorite, you're left with what happened last year, an impossibly frustrating march to the end where I can't even remember if I cared to watch the wild card game. And I think that's because at this point, the expectations for the team are, rightly, to win, and to win a lot. That means that my baseline expectation is higher and more likely to end up in frustration when baseball's special brand of day-after-day reality sets in. It almost makes me wonder if having down years or rebuilding periods is a net positive for fandom, because if the expectations aren't to win 95+ games then you can be pleasantly surprised, there's more room for things to go right instead of going wrong.