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224 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2012
* How we can never understand what we really want until we can recognize the nature of our frustration.
* How knowing what we don't want -- what we are running from -- may show us more about ourselves than what we think we want.
* How (in my view) our world has shifted from one where morality meant something to one where morality is a game, where the Good Person is replaced by the Impressive Person, and being caught lying is now the crime as opposed to lying itself.
* We always want to be somewhere other than now, and we spend our time searching for the escape. To paraphrase Anna Freud, fantasies are the one area of our life where we can have our eggs any way we want them but we cannot eat them.
* How our yearning, our striving, our continual hope for satisfaction is a game we play with ourselves to deal with the shifting sands of life. That frequently, our search for satisfaction is about revenge.
* Some thoughts on why we get pleasure watching the mad attempt to get what they want. About how the mad are actually those who are filled with the certainty of their view of the world, and how seeing them in character form helps us to face the madness of the world around us.
But one of the strange things about satisfaction is that its anticipation precedes its realization; that it happens twice -- not quite the first time as farce and the second time as tragedy -- but first wishfully (in fantasy) and then in reality if one is lucky.