It is worth wondering what happens to our erotic life, or to our sociability with each other and ourselves, when certainty becomes our picture of satisfaction. And what happens to our satisfaction, to our possibilities for satisfaction, when it does.

“joy of missing out”: the recognition that the renunciation of alternatives is what makes their choice a meaningful one in the first place.

which getting it is not always the point, in which there is nothing, to all intents and purposes, to get; and our picture of this can be, in adult life, when we are lost in thought, absorbed in something without needing to know why we are absorbed, or indeed what we are absorbed in; or when we dream.