For some it manifests as imposter syndrome, the belief that there’s a basic level of expertise that pretty much everyone else has attained, but that you haven’t, and that you won’t be able to stop second-guessing yourself until you get there. It also arises, for many of us, in the feeling of not yet having cracked the code of intimate relationships

The second piece of advice is to resist the urge to stockpile knowledge. At least where non-fiction sources are concerned, it’s easy to fall into the assumption that the point of reading or listening to things is to add to your storehouse of knowledge and insights, like a squirrel hoarding nuts, in preparation for a future when you’ll finally get t

go for a walk with a notebook, list the points that seem most compelling to me, put them in a sensible order, then practice a few times, enough to get a feel for the talk but not enough to render it stilted or rote.

Certainly, it was clear that achieving wealth or status didn’t cause the problem to go away – which makes sense, since in the modern world, external success is often the result of being even more enmeshed in the desperate game of catch-up than everyone else. ‘Most successful people,’ as the entrepreneur and investor Andrew Wilkinson has observed, ‘

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 claustrophob

Firstly, we can’t possibly think of every challenge we might end up facing. Secondly, even if we could, the solace we crave could only come from knowing we’d made it safely over the bridges in question – which we can’t ever know until we’ve actually crossed them.

Some tasks are legitimately time-sensitive, of course; but the unpleasant anxiety that attaches itself to tasks we’ve deemed ‘urgent’ is often a sign that someone else’s priorities are in control. The

applies to everything else, too: it’s ‘like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’)