It suggests that in order to count as having been “well spent,” your life needs to involve deeply impressive accomplishments, or that it should have a lasting impact on future generations—or at the very least that it must, in the words of the philosopher Iddo Landau, “transcend the common and the mundane.”

Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At

Resisting all this as an individual, or as a family, takes fortitude, because the smoother life gets, the more perverse you’ll seem if you insist on maintaining the rough edges by choosing the inconvenient way of doing things.

The digital nomad’s lifestyle lacks the shared rhythms required for deep relationships to take root.

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.

Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody

The Coast of Utopia,

Likewise, there’s no possibility of a romantic relationship being truly fulfilling unless you’re willing, at least for a while, to settle for that specific relationship, with all its imperfections—which means spurning the seductive lure of an infinite number of superior imaginary alternatives.

The harder you struggle to fit everything in, the more of your time you’ll find yourself spending on the least meaningful things.