Isaac Wolf

“crossed. Before, time was just the medium in which life unfolded, the stuff that life was made of. Afterward, once “time” and “life” had been separated in most people’s minds, time became a thing that you used—and it’s this shift that serves as the precondition for all the uniquely modern ways in which we struggle with time today.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“Yet it’s surely no coincidence that hobbies have acquired this embarrassing reputation in an era so committed to using time instrumentally. In an age of instrumentalization, the hobbyist is a subversive: he insists that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no payoffs in terms of productivity or profit. The derision we heap upon the avid stamp collector or train spotter might really be a kind of defense mechanism, to spare us from confronting the possibility that they’re truly happy in a way that the rest of us—pursuing our telic lives, ceaselessly in search of future fulfillment—are not.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“You’re obliged to deal with how your experience is unfolding in this moment, to resign yourself to the reality that this is it.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“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.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals