It wrenches us out of the present, leading to a life spent leaning into the future, worrying about whether things will work out, experiencing everything in terms of some later, hoped-for benefit, so that peace of mind never quite arrives. And it makes it all but impossible to experience “deep time,” that sense of timeless time which depends on forg

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And now consider what all this means for the crucial and basic question of choosing what to do with your limited time. As we’ve seen, it’s a fact of life that, as a finite human, you’re always making hard choices—so that, for example, in spending this afternoon on one thing that mattered to me (writing), I necessarily had to forgo many other things

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Our lives, thanks to their finitude, are inevitably full of activities that we’re doing for the very last time. Just as there will be a final occasion on which I pick up my son—a thought that appalls me, but one that’s hard to deny, since I surely won’t be doing it when he’s thirty—there will be a last time that you visit your childhood home, or sw... See more