Our troubled relationship with time arises largely from this same effort to avoid the painful constraints of reality.

‘we don’t have to consciously participate in what it’s like to feel claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless, and constrained by reality’

As long as you’re filling every hour of the day with some form of striving, you get to carry on believing that all this striving is leading you somewhere – to an imagined future state of perfection, a heavenly realm in which everything runs smoothly, your limited time causes you no pain, and you’re free of the guilty sense that there’s more you

Behind our urge to race through every obstacle or challenge, in an effort to get it ‘dealt with’, there’s usually the unspoken fantasy that you might one day finally reach the state of having no problems whatsoever. As a result, most of us treat the problems we encounter as doubly problematic: first because of whatever specific problem we’re facing

The venture capitalist and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian has observed that we often ‘don’t even realize something is broken until someone else shows us a better way’.

The Buddhist teacher Susan Piver points out that it can be surprisingly radical and discomfiting, for many of us, to ask how we’d enjoy spending our time.9 But at the very least, you shouldn’t rule out the possibility that the answer to that question is an indication of how you might use your time best.

But more often, the real problem is just that the other person is one other person. In other words, the cause of your difficulties isn’t that your partner is especially flawed, or that the two of you are especially incompatible, but that you’re finally noticing all the ways in which your partner is (inevitably) finite, and thus deeply disappointing

The limitations we’re trying to avoid when we engage in this self-defeating sort of procrastination frequently don’t have anything to do with how much we’ll be able to get done in the time available; usually, it’s a matter of worrying that we won’t have the talent to produce work of sufficient quality, or that others won’t respond to it as we’d

It is by consciously confronting the certainty of death, and what follows from the certainty of death, that we finally become truly present for our lives.