Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

by Kieran Setiya

There is a difference between knowing that something is worthwhile and knowing what makes it so, between knowing the existence of reasons for desire and knowing what those reasons are.

You may be tempted to take stock, to wrestle with the past. There is nothing wrong with that. But do not make a further mistake, the mistake of stepping back, abstracting from the details of your life, to ask what you should want. In abstracting, you discard a vital source of rational affirmation: not the bare existence of activities, artifacts, relationships, but their impossibly verdant depths. Do not weigh alternatives theoretically, but zoom in: let the specifics count against the grand cartoon of lives unlived. In doing so, you may find you cannot regret what you should have resisted at the time. I

That is the problem with being consumed by plans, obsessed with getting things done. If your sources of meaning are overwhelmingly telic then whatever their value—final, existential, ameliorative—they are schemes for which success can only mean cessation.