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

“Wanting takes time; partly because it takes some time to get over the resistances to wanting, and partly because we are often unconscious of what it is that we do want. But the worst thing we can be frustrated of is frustration itself; to be deprived of frustration is to be deprived of the possibilities of satisfaction. ”

“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). ”

“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?

“The myth of potential makes mourning and complaining feel like the realest things we ever do;and makes of our frustration a secret life of grudges.Even if we set aside the inevitable questions -How would we know if we had realized our potential? Where did we get our picture of this potential from? If we don’t have potential what do we have? -we can’t imagine our lives without the unlived lives they contain.”