Being alive is just happenstance, and not one more day of it is guaranteed. - Oliver Burkeman

perfectionism, at bottom, is a fear-driven striving to avoid the experience of failure at all costs. At its extremes, it is an exhausting and permanently stressful way to live.

Each time you kiss your child goodnight, he contends, you should specifically consider the possibility that she might die tomorrow. This is jarring advice that might strike any parent as horrifying, but Epictetus is adamant: the practice will make you love her all the more, while simultaneously reducing the shock should that awful eventuality ever come to pass.

Without noticing we're doing it, we treat the future as intrinsically more valuable than the present. And yet the future never seems to arrive.