If the sudden resignation and the wild affair do not subvert the telic orientation—if such popular tokens of the midlife crisis miss that particular point—we should turn with appreciation to a third great stereotype: buying a motorbike or sports car. The appeal of doing so has many sides, but one of them is a switch in focus from the value of

Try it yourself: a shift in focus from telic activities to their atelic counterparts.

Borrowing jargon from linguistics, we can say that some activities are “telic”: they aim at terminal states, at which they are finished and thus exhausted.7

How should we think about the lost opportunities, the regrets and failures, the finitude of life and the rush of activities that drive us through it?

So tell yourself this: although I may regret regret, desire that no desire go unfulfilled, I cannot in the end prefer to have desires that could be fully met. The sense of loss is real; but it is something to concede, not wish away. Embrace your losses as fair payment for the surplus of being alive.

In order to see the incoherence, we need to borrow a distinction from moral philosophy, between final and instrumental value.

The point I am making here is that it is not sufficient for meaning in life that one attend to the present, to the atelic activities in which you are engaged. It matters what you are doing, not just that you are doing it in the Now.

Psychological egoism is a conspiracy theory of human motivation, and about as credible.

There is empirical evidence that we struggle with choices that involve uncompensated loss.