Attachment, this argument runs, is the only thing that motivates anyone to accomplish anything worthwhile in the first place. If you weren't attached… - Oliver Burkeman

...no matter how much success you may experience in life, your eventual story - no offence intended - will be one of failure. Your bodily organs will fail, and you'll die.

our lives, thanks to their finitude, are inevitably full of activities that we're doing for the very last time. Just as there will be a final occasion on which I pick up my son — a thought that appalls me, but one that's hard to deny, since I surely won't be doing it when he's thirty — there will be a last time that you visit your childhood home, or swim in the ocean, or make love, or have a deep conversation with a certain close friend. Yet usually there'll be no way to know, in the moment itself, that you're doing it for the last time. Harris's point is that we should therefore try to treat every such experience with the reverence we'd show if it were the final instance of it. And indeed there's a sense in which every moment of life is a "last time." It arrives; you'll never get it again — and once it's passed, your remaining supply of moments will be one smaller than before. To treat all these moments solely as stepping-stones to some future moment is to demonstrate a level of obliviousness to our real situation that would be jaw-dropping if it weren't for the fact that we all do it, all the time.

The good procrastinator accepts the fact that she can't get everything done, then decides as wisely as possible what tasks to focus on and what to neglect. By contrast, the bad procrastinator finds himself paralysed precisely because he can't bear the thought of confronting his limitations