The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.

Gaiman’s line wryly punctures the grandiosity with which people often imagine “the future.” Instead of arriving as a decisive turning point, it tends to show up as ordinary days, incremental changes, and compromises—often falling short of the dramatic transformation we anticipated. The phrase “mildly discouraging” captures a specifically modern disenchantment: not catastrophe, but the quiet letdown of unmet expectations and the sense that time’s passage is indifferent to our plans. The sentence also plays with narrative tension: stories promise climactic futures, while lived experience frequently delivers anticlimax. Its humor comes from treating this as a universal law—futures, by their nature, disappoint.