But Schopenhauer was on to something. There is insight in his cynical account of our relationship with desire. Think of it this way. What gives purpose to your life is having goals. Yet in pursuing them, you either fail (not good) or in succeeding, bring them to a close. If what you care about is achievement—earning a promotion, having a child, wri

Despite their love of impenetrable jargon, philosophers have not evolved a terminology for this contrast, which is why I have been reduced to wordy circumlocution. (“Not just ameliorative” is a triple negative: not merely such as to prevent or extinguish something bad.) It is not my fault.

The key to happiness, then, is managing one’s expectations. (This seems like the right time to warn you that you are reading a very mediocre book.)

Not for nothing are we told that true comprehension of the insight I do not exist is accessible only through sustained and arduous meditation!

The key to happiness, then, is managing one’s expectations. (This seems like the right time to warn you that you are reading a very mediocre book.)

Schwandt proposed a mathematical model in which experienced life-satisfaction is a function of how well life is going at the time, combined with optimism for the future and disappointment about the present.

“incomplete” and heralds the “completeness” of seeing, understanding, and thinking: “at the same time, one is seeing and has seen, is understanding and has understood, is thinking and has thought.”

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.

If my problem is an excessive investment in telic activities, the solution is to love their atelic counterparts, to find meaning in the process, not the project. If your problem is mine, this solution will work for you.