Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson

For a while they talked in a different way than they normally did, about how things felt; and they agreed that lives were not easily told to others. Frank speculated that many life stories consisted precisely of a search for a reiterated pattern, for habits. Thus, one's set of habits was somehow unsatisfactory, and you needed to change them, and were thereby thrown into a plot, which was the hunt for new habits, or even, but exceptionally, the story of giving up of such a hunt in favor of sticking with what you have, or remaining chaotically in the existential moment (not adaptive if reproductive success were the goal, he noted under his breath). Thus Frank was living a plot, while Anna was living a life, and when they talked about personal matters he had news while she had the "same old same old," which was understood by both to be the desired state, irritating though it might be to maintain.

Anna merely laughed at this.

p. 143

Habitual existence as a life and interesting existences as "plots." And the Chinese say, "May you live in interesting times." LOL