For a civilisation so fixated on achieving happiness, we seem remarkably incompetent at the task. - Oliver Burkeman

You might easily never have been born, but fate granted you the opportunity to get stuck into the mess you see around you, whatever it is. You are here. This is it. You don't much matter – yet you matter as much as anyone ever did. The river of time flows inexorably on; amazingly, confoundingly, marvelously, we get the brief chance to go kayaking in it.

breaking things off, convinced that our partner's psychological issues are making things impossible, or that we're not as compatible as we'd believed. Either of these might conceivably be true in certain cases; people are sometimes guilty of spectacularly bad choices in love, and in other domains as well. But more often, the real problem is just that the other person is one other person. In other words, the cause of your difficulties isn't that your partner is especially flawed, or that the two of you are especially incompatible, but that you're finally noticing all the ways in which your partner is (inevitably) finite, and thus deeply disappointing by comparison with the world of your fantasy, where the limiting rules of reality don't apply. The point that Bergson made about the future — that it's more appealing than the present because you get to indulge in all your hopes for it, even if they contradict each other — is no less true of fantasy romantic partners, who can easily exhibit a range of characteristics that simply couldn't coexist in one person in the real world. It's common, for example, to enter a relationship unconsciously hoping that your partner will provide both an unlimited sense of stability and an unlimited sense of excitement — and then, when that's not what transpires, to assume that the problem is your partner and that these qualities might coexist in someone else, whom you should therefore set off to find. The reality is that the demands are contradictory. The qualities that make someone a dependable source of excitement are generally the opposite of those that make him or her a dependable source of stability. Seeking both in one real human isn't much less absurd than dreaming of a partner who's both six and five feet tall. And not only should you settle; ideally, you should settle in a way that makes it harder to back out, such as moving in together, or getting married, or having a child. The great irony of all our efforts to avoid facing fin

if you plan to spend some of your four thousand weeks doing what matters most to you, then at some point you're just going to have to start doing it.