Missing Out

Time pressure comes from forces outside ourselves.

“Work expands to fill the time available for its completion,” C. Northcote Parkinson wrote in 1955, coining what became known as Parkinson’s law.[¹]

We are living a limited amount of time. By confronting the certainty of death and what follows from the inevitability of death, we finally become present in our lives.

Being alive is an incident, and not one more day is guaranteed. The paradoxical reward for accepting reality’s constraints is that they no longer feel so constrained.

What you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much — and when it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe could not care less.[¹]

“Missing out” is what makes our choices meaningful in the first place.

[¹]: Oliver Burkeman(2021): Four Thousand Weeks (https://www.amazon.com/Four-Thousand-Weeks-Management-Mortals-ebook/dp/B08FGV64B1/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1649852994&sr=8-1)

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Rafael A. George Duval

✍🏼 Indie writer, chief editor of https://snippetsoftext.substack.com/ | 💻 Software Engineer | 📊 Tech Leadership