In brain-scrambling times like these, I like to read old books. I’m currently reading one of Michel de Montaigne’s essays every morning to avoid a.m. doomscrolling. 400 years ago, Montaigne wrote in “On Prognostications” about “the stubborn curiosity of our nature which delights in worrying about the future as if it had not enough to deal with in the present.” He then quotes Lucian: “Let the mind of men be blind to what is to be. May those who fear be permitted to hope.”

Austin Kleon

This makes me wonder why I didn’t think of that. My habit is to write every morning, but that usually makes me think more about the state of affairs these days, just increases the impulse towards doomscrolling.

An advantage of keeping a diary consists in the fact that one becomes aware with reassuring clarity of the transformations one incessantly undergoes…In the diary one finds proof that, even in conditions that today seem unbearable, one lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand thus moved as it does today…