nurture your relationships, pursue challenging goals, spend time in nature, and make room for fun. - Oliver Burkeman

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 claustrophobia and lack of escape routes that entails. ('Our suffering,' as Mel Weitsman, another Zen teacher, puts it, 'is believing there's a way out.')

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

Confronting the worst-case scenario saps it of much of its anxiety-inducing power. Happiness reached via positive thinking can be fleeting and brittle, negative visualization generates a vastly more dependable calm.