I believe that if I can’t impress people by how much I’ve accomplished, I can maybe be impressive with how practical my ambitions are, how little I expect.

How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?

I’d be at work at one of the series of thankless jobs I held throughout much of my life, seething with anger over how I could have been doing something better, more interesting, more suited to my talents or just less tedious and awful. This didn’t stop once I got finished with my shift, either. A huge segment of my life was given over to just feeling a kind of intense resentment toward whatever situation I was in.

Usually I lived with a general feeling that all would work out for the best, but this would be broken by occasional outbursts of misery in which I felt quite definitely that everything was hateful. These moments never lasted very long. Usually after a night's rest I would be back again in my vague optimism, never considering that my life was my own to live, that if I did not manage it as I wanted it no one else would. Into this smooth surface of taking things for granted there began to emerge an awareness of certain mental discomforts which up till then I had not known, only suffered.