At first, the news of impermanence typically generates a great deal of anxiety. In response, we attempt to make things solid and secure. We try our best to arrange the conditions of our lives, to manipulate the circumstances so that we can be happy. I love to lie in bed, particularly on a cold winter morning. The sheets are soft and warm. My body i

Far from making my life meaningful, eternity would make it meaningless, since my actions would have no purpose.

The exhilaration that sometimes arises when you grasp this truth about finitude has been called the “joy of missing out,” by way of a deliberate contrast with the idea of the “fear of missing out.” It is the thrilling recognition that you wouldn’t even really want to be able to do everything, since if you didn’t have to decide what to miss out on,

There is a] strange attitude and feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being, one is doing this or that, but whether it is [a relationship with] a woman or a job, it is not yet what is really wanted, and there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about … The one thing dreaded throughout by such