When I was younger my whole sense of self-worth was based on whether or not I was working which was awful. And I had a baby at 20 years old so it wasn't just about me. At around the age of 30 there was a stretch where I wasn't working - certainly not on anything I liked anyway - and I started to do other things.

It were a real increase of human happiness could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels or rendered otherwise invisible and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings till they emerged sadder and wiser at the age of twenty-five.

We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next. It is awful to see the lean hands of dotage making a coffer of the grave.