Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

In the absence of any hard-and-fast information and advice – and in the absence of any kind of consensus (or shared criteria) about what it is to live and to have lived – all we can do, if we are interested, is ask these questions and see what, if anything, we want to do.

mortality makes it impossible to ignore the absurdity of living solely for the future. Where’s the logic in constantly postponing fulfillment until some later point in time when soon enough you won’t have any “later” left?

There is on the one hand the confident assertion of where life and aliveness is – in defamiliarization, in language, in idiolect, in spontaneity, in surprise, in the life instincts – and then in counterpoint to this the question of why any of this occurs to us, or needs to be articulated. For animals, life is the living of it, the surviving of it,

If, at least in dreams and unconscious thinking, insignificant ideas are the carriers of significance, if intensity and value and meaning can be found in the places one would least expect them, then what is being required of us is a different kind of attention to ourselves. And a different picture of what sociability might involve; of what might be

“Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads – at least that’s where I imagine it – there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making ne

We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen.