Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can. - Oliver Burkeman

Inspiration is for amateurs,' the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. 'The rest of us just show up and get to work.

Living more meaningfully will reduce your anxiety about the possibility of future regret at not having lived meaningfully – which will, in turn, keep sapping death of its power to induce anxiety. As he puts it, there is a positive correlation between the fear of death and the sense of unlived life. Live a life suffused with the awareness of its own finitude, and you can hope to finish it in something like the fashion that Jean-Paul Sartre hoped to die: 'quietly . . . certain that the last burst of my heart would be inscribed on the last page of my work, and that death would be taking only a dead man'.

The overarching point is that what we think of as 'distractions' aren't the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They're just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.