The first ten million years were the worst. And the second ten million, they were the worst too. The third ten million I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.

Douglas Adams’s joke compresses an absurdly long lifespan into the familiar cadence of a human complaint. By repeating “the worst” across successive ten‑million‑year blocks, the speaker turns cosmic time into a deadpan, almost bureaucratic tally of dissatisfaction, parodying both self-pity and the way people narrate their lives in neat “phases.” The final line—“After that I went into a bit of a decline”—adds a comic anticlimax: after thirty million years of misery, the “decline” is treated as a minor downturn. The humor depends on understatement and scale, a hallmark of Adams’s style, and it also hints at existential weariness: longevity doesn’t guarantee meaning, only more time to complain.