Or to put it another way, why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it's so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it … - Oliver Burkeman

True security lies in the unrestrained embrace of insecurity - in the recognition that we never really stand on solid ground, and never can.

And here lies the essential between Stoicism and the modern-day 'cult of optimism.' For the Stoics, the ideal state of mind was tranquility, not the excitable cheer that positive thinkers usually seem to mean when they use the word, 'happiness.' And tranquility was to be achieved not by strenuously chasing after enjoyable experiences, but by cultivating a kind of calm indifference towards one's circumstances.

as the journalist Anne Helen Petersen writes in a widely shared essay on millennial burnout, you can't fix such problems "with vacation, or an adult coloring book, or 'anxiety baking,' or the Pomodoro Technique, or overnight fucking oats."