Anxious People

by Fredrik Backman

it’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is.

there’s such an unbelievable amount that we’re all supposed to be able to cope with these days. You’re supposed to have a job, and somewhere to live, and a family, and you’re supposed to pay taxes and have clean underwear and remember the password to your damn Wi-Fi.

We don’t have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day, because there’ll be another one coming along tomorrow.

At the end of your career you’re trying to find a point to it all, and at the start of it you’re looking for a purpose.

“Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you’re always judged by your worst moments. You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong you’re forever that parent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was hit in the head by a swing.

Parents are defined by their mistakes.”

Because that was a parent’s job: to provide shoulders. Shoulders for your children to sit on when they’re little so they can see the world, then stand on when they get older so they can reach the clouds, and sometimes lean against whenever they stumble and feel unsure.

It isn’t really the fact that his dad doesn’t understand how to use technology that drives his son mad, but the fact that he almost understands.

That’s an impossible thing for sons to grasp, and a source of shame for fathers to have to admit: that we don’t want our children to pursue their own dreams or walk in our footsteps. We want to walk in their footsteps while they pursue our dreams.

the bank robber was thirty-nine, and had therefore reached an age where there’s suddenly very little difference between fourteen and twenty.

but late in life even computer programmers become poets.