Do Not Spare Yourself: An Antidote to Feeling Like You Are Waiting to Start Living

Maria Popova · 27 Sept 2026

The piece opens with

Trying to protect yourself from heartbreak and loss is more dangerous than trying to save another person.

Their wordsThe only thing more dangerous than wanting to save another person - a dangerous desire too often mistaken for love - is wanting to save yourself, to spare yourself the disappointment and heartbreak and loss inseparable from being a creature with hopes and longings constantly colliding with reality, with the indifference of time and chance, with the opposing hopes and longings of others.

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Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Trying to protect yourself from heartbreak and loss is more dangerous than trying to save another person.

Their wordsThe only thing more dangerous than wanting to save another person - a dangerous desire too often mistaken for love - is wanting to save yourself, to spare yourself the disappointment and heartbreak and loss inseparable from being a creature with hopes and longings constantly colliding with reality, with the indifference of time and chance, with the opposing hopes and longings of others.
Our reading
A life spent in comfort, certainty and convenience is the most damning way a person can live.

Their wordsthere is no damnation greater than spending our allotted days in the catatonia of comfort and certainty, our inner lives automated by habit and halogen lit by convenience.

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