The spirit of the time is one of joyless urgency.
choosing to choose
Before, time was just the medium in which life unfolded the stuff that life was made of. Afterwards, once 'time' and 'life' had been separated in most people's minds, time became a thing that you used - and it's this shift that serves as the precondition for all the uniquely modern ways in which we struggle with time today. Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you've wasted it.
Soon, your sense of self-worth gets completely bound up with how you're using time: it stops being merely the water in which you swim and turns into something you feel you need to dominate or control, if you're to avoid feeling guilty, panicked or overwhelmed.
The trouble with attempting to master your time, it turns out, is that time ends up mastering you.
Haste is universal because everyone is on flight from himself.
The more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure you'll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time.
the inconvenience involved, which might look like brokenness from the outside, in fact embodies something essentially human.
we are a limited amount of time.
Any finite life is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility.
Principle number one is to pay yourself first when it comes to time.
Make a list of the top twenty five things you want out of life and arrange them in order. The top five should be those around which you organise time. The remaining twenty are the ones you should actively avoid at all costs.
You need to learn to start sating no to things you do want to do, with recognition that you have only one life.
The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.
When people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they're usually much happier as a result.
When you can no longer turn back, anxiety falls away, because now there's only one direction to travel: forward into the consequences of your choice.
Social media increasingly became a matter of 'doomscrolling' in a depressive daze through bottomless feed of bad news.
What you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is.
The more intensely he could hold his attention on the experience of whatever he was doing, the clearer it became to him that the real problem had been not the activity itself but his internal resistance to experiencing it. When he stopped trying to block out those sensations and attended to them instead, the discomfort would evaporate.
Some Zen Buddhists hold that the entirety of human suffering can be boiled down to this effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are going, because we wish they were going differently.
a plan is just a thought
We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is - all it could ever possibly be - is a present-moment statement of intent.
Living more fully in the present may be simply a matter of finally realising that you never had any other option but to be here now.
leisure was life's centre of gravity, the default state to which work was a sometimes inevitable interruption.
when your relationship with time is almost entirely instrumental, the present moment starts to lose its meaning.
Results aren't everything. Indeed, they'd better not be, because results always come later - and later is always too late.
What's the solution? Stay on the fucking bus.
But having all the time in the world isn't much use if you're forced to experience it all on your own.
every gain in personal temporal freedom entails a corresponding loss in how easy it is to coordinate your time with other people's.
They derived psychological benefits not merely from holiday time, but from having the same holiday time as other people.
Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?