‘dailyish’ isn’t synonymous with ‘just do it whenever you feel like it.’

Then you get to relax. But you also get to accomplish more, and to enjoy yourself more in the process, because you’re no longer so busy denying the reality of your predicament, consciously or otherwise.

Free up time by renegotiating existing commitments, not just planning to make fewer.

The commitment-phobe can’t bear to enter ‘time and space completely’ because letting himself be pinned down to one relationship or career path means renouncing the other ones. He imagines that what he’s doing instead is keeping his options open, though he has of course chosen a path – because choosing to use up some of your finite time in a state

There’s no prize for failing to spend your time as you wish, to whatever extent you’re able, out of a misplaced sense of solidarity with those who cannot.

Because our problem, it turns out, was never that we hadn’t yet found the right way to achieve control over life, or safety from life. Our real problem was imagining that any of that might be possible in the first place for finite humans, who, after all, just find themselves unavoidably in life, with all the limitations and feelings of

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger described this state of affairs using the word Geworfenheit, or ‘thrownness,’ a suitably awkward word for an awkward predicament: merely to come into existence is to find oneself thrown into a time and place you didn’t choose, with a personality you didn’t pick, and with your time flowing away beneath you,

repeatedly starting but rarely finishing things, or finishing them only under duress, is a recipe for misery.

Social psychologists describe what’s going on here using the language of ‘construal level theory,’ which refers to the way we conceive of objects and events as if from different mental altitudes. The classic example concerns summer vacations. Consider how you’d like to spend yours next year, and you’re likely to picture it, figuratively speaking,