The conservative American economist Thomas Sowell summed things up with a bleakness I appreciate, insisting that there are no solutions, only trade-o… - Oliver Burkeman

He should think of himself more 'like a frog', she said. Shapiro was wondering whether to feel insulted when she explained: 'You should sun yourself on a lily-pad until you get bored; then, when the time is right, you should jump to a new lily-pad and hang out there for a while. Continue this over and over, moving in whatever direction feels right.

Confronting the worst-case scenario saps it of much of its anxiety-inducing power. Happiness reached via positive thinking can be fleeting and brittle; negative visualisation generates a vastly more dependable calm.

John Maynard Keynes saw the truth at the bottom of all this, which is that our fixation on what he called "purposiveness" — on using time well for future purposes, or on "personal productivity," he might have said, had he been writing today — is ultimately motivated by the desire not to die. "The 'purposive' man," Keynes wrote, "is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his actions by pushing his interests in them forward into time. He does not love his cat, but his cat's kittens; nor in truth the kittens, but only the kittens' kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of cat-dom. For him, jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam tomorrow and never jam today. Thus by pushing his jam always forward into the future, he strives to secure for his act of boiling it an immortality." Because he never has to "cash out" the meaningfulness of his actions in the here and now, the purposive man gets to imagine himself an omnipotent god, whose influence over reality extends infinitely off into the future; he gets to feel as though he's truly the master of his time. But the price he pays is a steep one. He never gets to love an actual cat, in the present moment. Nor does he ever get to enjoy any actual jam. By trying too hard to make the most of his time, he misses his life.