Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

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. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living. Sometimes, it felt as if you might be walking down Brattle St

For Sylvia Plath, existence was a fig tree and each possible life she could live – the happily-married one, the successful-poet one – was this sweet juicy fig, but she couldn’t get to taste the sweet juicy figs and so they just rotted right in front of her. It can drive you insane, thinking of all the other lives we don’t live.

What is the value of having options you do not exercise, paths you do not walk?

It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living.

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