Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

four kinds of frustration: the frustration of being deprived of something that has never existed; the frustration of being deprived of something one has never had (whether or not it exists); the frustration of being deprived of something one has had; and, finally, the frustration of being deprived of something one once had, but can’t have again.

They are questions of loss and regret, success and failure, the lives you wanted and the life you have. They are questions of mortality and finitude, of emptiness in the pursuit of projects, whatever they are. Ultimately, they are questions about the temporal structure of human life and the activities that occupy it. This is a book not just for the

We see a future of satisfaction in a present of deprivation.

In this story, self-knowledge is the precondition for satisfaction. And then, in this same culture, we are also encouraged to believe, by psychoanalysis, that such recognition of what we need and want, were it possible, would be something we couldn’t tolerate;