"Roman philosopher Seneca wrote On The Shortness of Life. 'This space that has been granted to us rushes by so speedily, and so swiftly that all save a very few find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live'
"Keynes seems to have assumed that we would naturally throttle down on work once our essential needs, plus a few extra desires, were satisfied. Instead, we just keep finding new things to need."
"Instead, as the efficiency of housework increased, so did the standards of cleanliness and domestic order that society came to expect. Now that the living-room carpet could be kept perfectly clean, it had to be; now that clothes never needed to be grubby, grubbiness was all the more taboo. These days, you can answer work emails in bed at midnight. So should that message you got at 5.30pm really wait till morning for a reply?"
"One of the sneakier pitfalls of an efficiency-based attitude to time is that we start to feel pressured to use our leisure time 'productively', too – an attitude which implies that enjoying leisure for its own sake, which you might have assumed was the whole point of leisure, is somehow not quite enough. And so we find ourselves, for example, travelling to unfamiliar places not for the sheer experience of travel, but in order to add to our mental storehouse of experiences, or to our Instagram feeds."
"'Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.'"
"No wonder we are so drawn to the problem of how to make better use of our days: if we could solve it, we could avoid the feeling, in Seneca’s words, of finding life at an end just when we were getting ready to live. To die with the sense of nothing left undone: it’s nothing less than the promise of immortality by other means."
FWC - And that's just the point, don't measure "done" vs. "undone"--which is merely a metaphor for unobtainable immortality--, but rather how much you enjoy the "doing". Did I enjoy my day today? How am I going to enjoy my day tomorrow? I.e. if you start from a place where you realize immortality is unobtainable then it's not about "doing things before I die" but rather "doing things that I enjoy today, while I'm alive."