Many, over the course of time, have come to be seen as inevitable milestones in the march of progress.
Jonathan Hopper, managing director of buying agents Garrington Property Finders, said London's "half-million milestone" was inevitable, but added: "The average London property price won't stay at £500,000 for long.
But rather than measuring them as milestones toward inevitable decline and demise, why not use them to sustain our health?
I'm struck less by the milestone she represents, an inevitable one, than by the campaign that preceded it.
Around Misurata, rebels began firing into the night sky, celebrating a milestone in the slow, inevitable dismembering of the Qaddafi clan.
This is a milestone of sorts, and also an inevitable transition resulting from the overfishing of wild fish stocks and a 30-year boom in aquaculture.
The pursuit of a sports milestone can seem like a march to the inevitable.
Cheered every time he walks out to bat and lauded as he departs, his problem is, as Vic Marks succinctly put it in the Guardian "that the time that elapses between his standing ovations is reducing with every innings".Even if doesn't happen in this series, it seems inevitable that Mr Tendulkar, now 38 years old, will reach his milestone at some point.
Every time we get ourselves into an economic mess, there's usually some milestone idiocy we can point back to as the government action that made the meltdown inevitable.
At the same time, the aptly titled 'Beginners,' which tells a story of a young love reaching its inevitable and heartbreaking conclusion, could only be told by someone in the midst of reaching this universally-human milestone.
