But there’s a deeper sense in which merely to be alive on the planet today is to be haunted by the feeling of having ‘too much to do’, whether or not you lead a busy life in any conventional sense. Think of it as ‘existential overwhelm’: the modern world provides an inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing, and so there arises an inevitable and unbridgeable gap between what you’d ideally like to do and what you actually can do.
