The most liberating and empowering and productive step you can take, if you want to spend more of your time on the planet doing what matters to you, is to grasp the sense in which life as a finite human being – with limited time, and limited control over that time – is really much worse than you think. Completely beyond hope, in fact. You know that cloud of melancholy that sometimes descends – when you’re awake in the dark at three in the morning, perhaps, or towards the end of a frazzled Thursday at work – when it seems as though the life you’d envisaged for yourself might never come to
...more
