Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

by Adam Phillips

We pressurize the world to be there for our benefit. And yet we quickly notice as children – it is, perhaps, the first thing we do notice – that our needs, like our wishes, are always potentially unmet. Because we are always shadowed by the possibility of not getting what we want, we learn, at best, to ironize our wishes – that is, to call our wants wishes: a wish is only a wish until, as we say, it comes true – and, at worst, to hate our needs. But we also learn to live somewhere between the lives we have and the lives we would like.

Indeed, our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live.

Our lived lives could become a mourning for our unlived lives.

We share our lives with the people we have failed to be.

We discover these unlived lives most obviously in our envy of other people, and in the conscious (and unconscious) demands we make on our children to become something that was beyond us.

Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and desires sacrificed, to possibilities refused, to roads not taken. The myth of our potential can make of our lives a perpetual falling-short, a continual and con...

Once the next life – the better life, the fuller life – has to be in this one we have a considerable task on our hands. Now someone is asking us not only to survive but to flourish, not simply or solely to be good but to make the most of our lives. It is a quite different kind of demand. The story of our lives becomes the story of the lives we were prevented from living.

For disillusioned non-believers – who, of course, pre-dated Darwin and created the conditions for his work and its reception – belief in God (and providential design) was replaced by belief in the infinite untapped talents and ambitions of human beings (and in the limitless resources of the earth). It became the enduring project of our modern cultures of redemption – cultures committed above all to science and progress – to create societies in which people can realize their potential, in which ‘growth’ and ‘productivity’ and ‘opportunity’ are the watchwords (it is essential to the myth of potential that scarcity is scarcely mentioned: and growth is always possible and expected).

Non-believers before Darwin needed untapped potential.

Because we are nothing special – on a par with ants and daffodils – it is the work of culture to make us feel special; just as parents need to make their children feel special to help them bear and bear with – and hopefully enjoy – their insignificance in the larger scheme of things. In this sense growing up is always an undoing of what needed to be done; first, ideally, we are made to feel special, then we are expected to enjoy a world in which we are not.

Culture makes us feel special.

We certainly tend to be more special, if only to ourselves, in our (imaginary) unlived lives.

So it is worth wondering what the need to be special prevents us seeing about ourselves – other, that is, than the unfailing transience of our lives; what the need to be special stops us from being. This, essentially, is the question psychoanalysis was invented to address: what kind of pleasures can sustain a creature that is nothing special? Once the promise of immortality, of being chosen, was displaced by the promise of more life – the promise, as we say, of getting more out of life – the unlived life became a haunting presence in a life legitimated by nothing more than the desire to live it.

Where Darwin wanted to talk of survival as adaptation – thereby rendering everything we call culture simply a toolkit for survival, for getting through life – Freud wanted to talk of survival as pleasure-seeking, and of pleasure-seeking and the avoidance of pain as the only purpose of a life.

‘If I wish to limit myself to facts,’ Camus writes in The Myth of Sisyphus, ‘I know what man wants, I know what the world offers him, and now I can say that I also know what links them. I have no need to dig deeper.’ This misfit, that is the only fit there is between ‘man’ and his world, between what he wants and what is on offer, is what Camus calls, a little distractingly, the ‘Absurd’.

We can’t actually get round our wanting, nor can we get round what is really available; these are what Camus calls the facts (and Freud calls the ‘reality principle’). And this discord, this supposed mismatch, is the origin of our experience of missing out, and the origin of engaged political action; as though we believe there is a world elsewhere of what Freud calls ‘complete satisfaction’, and that Camus might call a more just world.

Any ideal, any preferred world, is a way of asking, what kind of world are we living in that makes this the solution (our utopias tell us more about our lived lives, and their privations, than about our wished-for lives); or, to put it more clinically, what would the symptom have to be for this to be the self-cure?

What is the symptom that needs our unlived life as a cure?

In Freud’s story our possibilities for satisfaction depend upon our capacity for frustration; if we can’t let ourselves feel our frustration – and, surprisingly, this is a surprisingly difficult thing to do – we can’t get a sense of what it is we might be wanting, and missing, of what might really give us pleasure (greed is despair about pleasure).

When we are frustrated the unlived life is always beckoning; the unlived life of gratified desire returns as a possibility.