living in the present is not a suspension of ordinary life but a way of being immersed in it. Atelic activities do not occupy some rarefied peak to which we seldom ascend. If you look for them, you can find them, and find meaning in them, all around.

What I envy about myself at seventeen is not that I had all this ahead of me, but the time before I had to choose, before I knew what my losses would be. In philosophers’ terms, the shift in perspective is not temporal, but “epistemic”: it has to do with knowledge. Emotionally, there is a fundamental difference between knowing that I will miss out

Think twice before you wreck your home. Is it the space inside you hate, or the fact that it has walls?

What is the value of having options you do not exercise, paths you do not walk?

There is consolation in the fact that missing out is an inexorable side effect of the richness of human life.

To wish for a life without loss is to wish for a profound impoverishment in the world or in your capacity to engage with it, a drastic limiting of horizons.

Commensurable values are measured on a single scale; the greater subsumes and compensates for what is less. There is no basis for unsatisfied desire in turning down one fifty-dollar bill, since the desire that explains why you would want that bill, the desire for money, is better met by taking two. Decisions of this kind are comparatively rare. Sup

I don’t agree with Aristotle. When the demands of life are pressing, too urgent to be ignored, it would be a mistake to devote all day to contemplation, reading Wordsworth, or playing golf. Being mortal, think of mortal things.

Hence the second rule: in your job, your relationships, your spare time, you must make room for activities with existential value.