If only projects give us reason to live, as Williams suggests, what I have described as a midlife crisis is simply the human condition.

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

Jaques’s examples are largely drawn not from his clinical practice but from the lives of creative artists. He was struck by the frequency with which the age of thirty-seven, or thereabouts, brings either creative silence or transformation.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, named for his son, Nicomachus, Aristotle argued that a good life is one of virtuous activity in accordance with reason. His word for happiness or human flourishing, “eudaimonia,” has been adopted by psychologists who distinguish self-realization or “eudaimonic well-being” from “hedonic well-being” or the experience of

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

Think of the days on which you have nothing to look forward to but sleep: a respite from childcare, putting out fires at work, fighting to keep your relationships alive. Don’t get me wrong, these things all matter. Their value may be final; but it is essentially ameliorative. Caught on the treadmill of what has to be done, day by day, you may not

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

“Her intellectual gifts do but minister to a moral character that is the noblest and best balanced I have ever met with in life.”

And the question is not simply what to do, but what you have done and what you have not done, what to feel and how to think about yourself.