You can't know that things will turn out all right. The struggle for certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one — which means you have permission to … - Oliver Burkeman

The truth, then is that spending at least some of your leisure time "wastefully", focused solely on the pleasure of the experience, is the only way not to waste it - to be truly at leisure rather than covertly engaged in future-focused self-improvement.

Fortunately, there are three pieces of advice for navigating a world of infinite information that are more genuinely helpful. The first is to treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it's your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by.

perfectionism, at bottom, is a fear-driven striving to avoid the experience of failure at all costs. At its extremes, it is an exhausting and permanently stressful way to live.