The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fuelled panic about making the most of your limited time. It’s a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible – the quest to become the optimised, infinitely capable,

A time traveller from an ancient Hindu civilisation would have no difficulty recognising our era as part of the Kali Yuga, that phase in the cycle of history when, according to Hindu mythology, everything starts to unravel: governments crumble, the environment collapses and strange weather events proliferate, refugees pour across borders, and

What happened is inexplicably incredible. It’s the greatest gift ever unwrapped. Not the deaths, not the virus, but The Great Pause … Please don’t recoil from the bright light beaming through the window. I know it hurts your eyes. It hurts mine, too. But the curtain is wide open … The Great American Return to Normal is coming … [but] I beg of you:

when it comes to your time, you can experiment with what it feels like to not try to exert an iron grip on your timetable: to sometimes let the rhythms of family life and friendships and collective action take precedence over your perfect morning routine or your system for scheduling your week. You can grasp the truth that power over your time

we do each get to decide whether to collaborate with the ethos of individual time sovereignty or to resist it. You can push your life a little further in the direction of the second, communal sort of freedom. For one thing, you can make the kinds of commitments that remove flexibility from your schedule in exchange for the rewards of community, by

Peck’s insight here – that if you’re willing to endure the discomfort of not knowing, a solution will often present itself – would be helpful enough if it were merely a piece of advice for fixing lawnmowers and cars. But his larger point is that it applies almost everywhere in life: to creative work and relationship troubles, politics and

This is another mystery, though, that’s illuminated when you understand it as a form of resistance to our built-in human limitations. The reason that technological progress exacerbates our feelings of impatience is that each new advance seems to bring us closer to the point of transcending our limits; it seems to promise that this time, finally, we

Yet it’s surely no coincidence that hobbies have acquired this embarrassing reputation in an era so committed to using time instrumentally. In an age of instrumentalisation, the hobbyist is a subversive: he insists that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no pay-offs in terms of productivity or profit. The derision we

To rest for the sake of rest – to enjoy a lazy hour for its own sake – entails first accepting the fact that this is it: that your days aren’t progressing towards a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness, and that to approach them with such an assumption is systematically to drain our four thousand weeks of their value.