What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others. - Alain de Botton

It is hope — with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet — that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces.

Our feelings of anxiety are genuine but confused signals that something is amiss, and so need to be listened to and patiently interpreted — processes which are unlikely to be completed when we have to hand, in the computer, one of the most powerful tools of distraction ever invented. The entire internet is in a sense pornographic, a deliverer of a constant excitement that we have no innate capacity to resist, a seducer that leads us down paths that for the most part do nothing to answer our real needs.

established views have frequently emerged not through a process of faultless reasoning, but through centuries of intellectual muddle. There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are.