To rest for the sake of rest — to enjoy a lazy hour for its own sake — entails first accepting the fact that this is it: that your days aren't progre… - Oliver Burkeman

as the journalist Anne Helen Petersen writes in a widely shared essay on millennial burnout, you can't fix such problems "with vacation, or an adult coloring book, or 'anxiety baking,' or the Pomodoro Technique, or overnight fucking oats."

Think of it as "existential overwhelm": the modern world provides an inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing, and so there arises an inevitable and unbridgeable gap between what you'd ideally like to do and what you actually can do.

It was said of Rabbi Simcha Bunim that he carried two slips of paper, one in each pocket. On one he wrote: Bishvili nivra ha'olam – "For my sake the world was created." On the other he wrote: V'anokhi afar v'aefer – "I am but dust and ashes." He would take out each slip of paper as necessary, as a reminder to himself.' – TOBA SPITZER