Sublime

it always involves a metaphysics of transcendence.

Hope, writes the moral philosopher Kieran Setiya,18 “keeps the flicker of potential agency alive.”

“an individual person has a set of desires, concerns or, as I shall call them, projects, which help to constitute a character”; these “ground projects [provide] the motive force which propels him into the future, and gives him a reason for living.”

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

The question is how to feel about everything, about the whole of existence and the place of humankind within it

When we do not know what we should hope for, we can hope to learn.

Hence the second rule: in your job, your relationships, your spare time, you must make room for activities with existential value.