Christian moralists have hence long understood that, to reassure the anxious, it may be best to emphasise that, contrary to what an optimistic mindset teaches us, everything will in fact turn out for the worst: the ceiling will cave in, the bank will lie in ruins, we will die, everyone we love will vanish and all our achievements and even our names will be stamped into the ground. If the idea brings comfort, it may be because something within us instinctively recognises how closely our miseries are bound up with the grandiosity of our ambitions. To consider our petty status-worries from the perspective of a thousand years hence is to be granted a rare, tranquilising glimpse of our own insignificance.

- Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety : 248