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The miracle of modern technology today is idealised by almost everyone. The way in which technology has placed the world at our feet, ensuring that we are at the centre of the universe even while lying on our couches, and that we find solutions simply by swiping our finger along a screen, has irredeemably conquered us.

Along with the rising death toll due to coronavirus complications, a usually latent aspect of our fear becomes harder to ignore. Despite the fact that it is the only certainty we all share, realising that our own end is a reality we might need to confront sooner than we had thought leaves many of us fervently searching for consolation.

"What is this life if, full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare." — from the poem "Leisure" by William H. Davies.

Crouched in the trenches of the horror of old age, modern individuals no longer wish to recover anything from the natural ageing process that their ancestors practised with such serenity. On the contrary, the first signs of physical decline become the raw material for a wide range of efforts (from picturesque to sickly) to forge a youth that the mirror refuses to restore.

An experimenter is like a hunter who, instead of waiting quietly for game, tries to make it rise, by beating up the locality where he assumes it is. – Francis Bacon, 17th-century English philosopher

One night, thousands of miles apart, two young women of the same age made a decision—a seemingly trivial one, but one that would seal the fate of one of them.

On any given day, a typical person checks the clock several dozen times.

It’s strange how popular the saying What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger is, when it’s obvious that it is not what hits you that makes you stronger, but the way you take the hit.