Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

by Kieran Setiya

The key to happiness, then, is managing one’s expectations.

There is consolation in the fact that missing out is an inexorable side effect of the richness of human life.

Embrace your losses as fair payment for the surplus of being alive.

Because there is value in having options, you will miss having them: an argument for nostalgia. But the value is easy to overrate.

Think twice before you wreck your home. Is it the space inside you hate, or the fact that it has walls?

You can’t have it both ways, knowing who you are but not who you are

In principle, at least, we do not need a time machine to mute the regrets that occupy midlife. What we need is a rational way to shift our perspective on past events in light of their relation to the present.

It is the value of human life, crying out for affirmation, that silences the murmur of regret.

There is meaning in the protest.