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 probl… - Oliver Burkeman

There's never any closure in an awe-inspired life, only constant acceptance of the mysteries of life.

that was how plenty of people felt in 634 BC in Rome, as well, when they were convinced that the city was destined to collapse after 120 years of existence. It is how people have felt at countless points in history since then. Try searching Google's library of digitised manuscripts for the phrase 'these uncertain times', and you'll find that it occurs over and over, in hundreds of journals and books, in virtually every decade the database encompasses, reaching back to the seventeenth century. 'As a matter of fact,' Watts insisted, 'our age is no more insecure than any other. Poverty, disease, war, change and death are nothing new.

One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.