Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together. They are much more like you than you w… - Oliver Burkeman

Richard Reid, the would-be 'shoe bomber', had been tackled and subdued on board a flight from Paris to Miami, thereby initiating the era of compulsory shoe-checking for all travellers.

The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control — when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you're meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody's angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you've become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let's start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen.

It is as if a new physical law has been described for us bespoke: absolute as all the others are, yet terrifyingly casual. It is a law of perception. It says, You will lose everything that catches your eye.