A Great Book to Help You Defeat "Time Anxiety"

“Escaping from suffering means knowing the way out of suffering; it doesn't mean running away from wherever suffering arises. By doing that you just carry your suffering with you."

“The day is never coming when all the other stuff will be ‘out of the way,’ so you can turn at last to building a life of meaning and accomplishment that hums with vitality. For finite humans, the time for that has to be now.”

“When you give up the unwinnable struggle to do everything, that’s when you can start pouring your finite time and attention into a handful of things that truly count.

When you no longer demand perfection from your creative work, your relationships, or anything else, that’s when you’re free to plunge energetically into them.

And when you stop making your sanity or self-worth dependent on first reaching a state of control that humans don’t get to experience, you’re able to start feeling sane and enjoying life now, which is the only time it ever is.”

“The only two questions, at any moment of choice in life, is what the price is, and whether or not it’s worth paying.”

“Social media, at its best, is like having thousands of unpaid assistants scouring the globe for content you’re likely to find particularly fascinating.”

“Since the incoming supply of genuinely interesting stuff is effectively limitless, improving the efficiency with which you discover it just means you’re bombarded with books, articles, podcasts, and videos that seem like they might contain a nugget of wisdom critical for your happiness or professional success.

The challenge isn’t to locate a few needles of relevance in a haystack of dross. The challenge, in the words of the technology critic Nicholas Carr, is figuring out how to deal, day in day out, with ‘haystack-sized piles of needles.’”

“Moving more quickly through an infinite incoming supply of something never gets you to the end of it.”

“Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by.”

“What is worry, at its core, but the activity of a mind attempting to picture every single bridge that might possibly have to be crossed in future, then trying to figure out how to cross it?”

“Perfectionists love to begin new endeavors, because the moment of starting belongs to the world of limitlessness: for as long as you haven’t done any work on a project, it’s still possible to believe that the end result might match the ideal in your mind. You can luxuriate in the feeling of pure potential.”

“My mom used to get really upset at what she perceived as my half-assing. I’m 48 now, have a PhD and a thriving and influential career, and I still think there is very very little that’s worthy of applying my whole entire ass. I’m not interested in burning myself out by whole-assing stuff that will be fine if I half- or quarter-ass it. Being able to achieve maximum economy of ass is an important adult skill.”

“Almost everything that happens is either a good time or a good story.”

“You can never tell in advance. We try so hard to cling to the rock face of fixed focus; we fall off, again and again - yet when we do, as Tarrant beautifully puts it, ‘the world catches us every time.’ We lose our grip on our plans for the day, and find ourselves tumbling into life.”

“We make ourselves more miserable than necessary, not just by railing against negative experiences we’re having, or craving experiences we aren’t having, but by trying too hard to hold on to good things that are happening exactly as we wanted them to.”

“Still, the point stands: nothing that anyone has ever done required superhuman capacities in order to do it.”

“You might easily never have been born, but fate granted you the opportunity to get stuck into the mess you see around you, whatever it is. You are here. This is it. You don’t much matter - yet you matter as much as anyone ever did. The river of time flows inexorably on; amazingly, confoundingly, marvelously, we get the brief chance to go kayaking in it.”

“There was the cat, asleep. He ordered a cup of coffee, slowly stirred the sugar, sipped it (this pleasure had been denied him in the clinic), and thought, as he smoothed the cat’s black coat, that this contact was an illusion and that the two beings, man and cat, were as good as separated by a glass, for man lives in time, in succession, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant.”

“If you’ve accompanied me this far, I trust it won’t come as a devastating shock to learn that, notwithstanding this book’s subtitle, no one should expect to fully embrace their limits, confront their mortality, and find psychological freedom in a mere four weeks.”

“As an imperfectionist, you don’t have to pretend this situation is without its poignancy, its seasons of grief, its spells of loneliness, confusion, or despair. But you no longer fight as hard as you once did to persuade yourself this isn’t the way things are, or that human existence ought to be otherwise.

Instead, you choose to put down that impossible burden - and to keep on putting it down when you realize, as you frequently will, that you’ve inadvertently picked it up again. And so you move forward into life with greater vigor, a more peaceful mind, more openness to others, and, on your better days, the exhilaration that comes from savoring reality’s bracing air.”