Much misery arises from the fantasy that things might be otherwise.

Half the anxiety of having “too much to do” stems from not seeing that there will always be too much to do – so you can stop struggling to get on top of it all. And as the writer Sam Harris notes, we make various everyday problems worse with our implicit indignation that we must deal with them at all – as if we imagined we might one day get to live a problem-free life.

Christian Bobin, a French poet, describes an epiphany: “I was peeling a red apple from the garden when I suddenly understood that life would only ever give me a series of wonderfully insoluble problems. With that thought, an ocean of profound peace entered my heart.”

There’s much that people shouldn’t have to cope with, and that we should fight. But coping per se? That’s just life.

Oliver Burkeman, Too many problems? Maybe coping isn’t the answer