Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

And these, we might say, are two ways of murdering the world: making it impotent or making it unreal. If this was quantifiable we would say that the good life proposed by psychoanalysis is one in which there is just the right amount of frustration.

‘Life, he logically opined, was what he must somehow arrange to annex and possess.’ The implication here being that life might get away from him, that it can somehow escape us; that even though we are to all intents and purposes alive, we have to arrange to annex and possess life as though it is something we must colonize, or claim, or appropriate.