Status Updates From Missing Out: In Praise of t...

دانستن اینکه چه چیزی نمی‌خواهید به این معنا نیست که می‌دانید چه چیزی می‌خواهید.

We make our lives pleasurable, and therefore bearable, by picturing them as they might be; it is less obvious though what these compelling fantasy lives – lives of, as it were, a more complete satisfaction – are a self-cure for. Our solutions tell us what our problems are; our fantasy lives are not – or not necessarily – alternatives to, or refuges from, those real lives but an essential part of them.

There is always what will turn out to be the life we led, and the life that accompanied it, the parallel life (or lives) that never actually happened, that we lived in our minds, the wished-for life (or lives): the risks untaken and the opportunities avoided or unprovided. We refer to them as our unlived lives because somewhere we believe that they were open to us.