The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fueled 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 optimized, infinitely capable, emot

Life is fluid, evanescent, evolving in every cell, in every breath. Never perfect. To be alive is by definition messy, always leaning towards disorder and surprise.

‘The nature of finite things as such is to have the seed of passing away as their essential being: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.’ – G. W. F. HEGEL

everything is transitory—everything and everybody, be it, say, a child we have produced, or the great love from which the child has sprung, or a great thought—they are transitory altogether.

By instilling this sense of transience, Knausgaard seeks to awaken his own attention and the attention of his readers. He wants to counteract habit: to prevent himself from taking his life for granted and see the world anew. This attempt to break with habit—to deepen the sensation of being alive, to make moments of time more vivid—is necessarily in

Our ultimate insignificance makes the case for living well in the present, for no other purpose survives. It

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, e