What is anxiety? It is the next day. With whom, then, does the pagan contend in anxiety? With himself, with a delusion, because the next day is a pow… - Oliver Burkeman

I think the reason that we seek distraction is that working on stuff that we care about is often scary. It brings us into contact with all the ways in which we’re limited—our talents might not be up to what we’re trying to do, and we can’t control how things will unfold.

Even an undertaking as seemingly hedonistic as a year spent backpacking around the globe could fall victim to the same problem, if your purpose isn't to explore the world but — a subtle distinction, this — to add to your mental storehouse of experiences, in the hope that you'll feel, later on, that you'd used your life well.

The first is to develop a taste for having problems. Behind our urge to race through every obstacle or challenge, in an effort to get it "dealt with," there's usually the unspoken fantasy that you might one day finally reach the state of having no problems whatsoever. As a result, most of us treat the problems we encounter as doubly problematic: first because of whatever specific problem we're facing; and second because we seem to believe, if only subconsciously, that we shouldn't have problems at all. Yet the state of having no problems is obviously never going to arrive.