“No one lives in isolation and a life in regression pulls back the progress of other lives, in the way that a negative number reduces the value of the whole quantity or set.”

Sorting your life out looks like private business, and it isn’t. A life that has stalled still occupies the road: other people slow for it, work around it, and spend their own hours on problems it made. The reverse holds too, since somebody with their affairs in order tends to solve things for the people nearest them without being asked. Traffic makes the point. Rules feel like a limit on any single driver right up until they are waived, and then everyone moves at once and nobody arrives.