When you start to view each day not as a matter of paying off a debt, but as an opportunity to move a small-but-meaningful number of items over to yo… - Oliver Burkeman

Alan Watts explained with characteristic vigor: Take education. What a hoax. As a child, you are sent to nursery school. In nursery school, they say you are getting ready to go on to kindergarten. And then first grade is coming up and second grade and third grade … In high school, they tell you you're getting ready for college. And in college you're getting ready to go out into the business world … [People are] like donkeys running after carrots that are hanging in front of their faces from sticks attached to their own collars. They are never here. They never get there. They are never alive.

Part of the problem with positive thinking, and many related approaches to happiness, is exactly this desire to reduce big questions to one-size-fits-all self-help tricks or ten point plans.

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way that I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.