#aspiration

The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, in his book “Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life,” says that he is struck by how often people in psychoanalytic treatment talk about experiences they have not had, “and how authoritatively, with what passion and conviction, they talk about what they have missed out on.” His book is a meditation on the gap between the lives we live and the ones we imagine for ourselves. “We are made to feel special,” he says, “then we are expected to enjoy a world in which we are not.” We remain special, he goes on, “if only to ourselves, in our (imaginary) unlived lives.” I missed out on the Candie’s, but missing out is not necessarily a bad thing. Having everything we want would leave us nothing to desire, to hope for, to expect. We need both the reassuring delusion of what we imagine, and a reality that can’t deliver it. Life’s pleasures are, in part, pleasures we never partake in. Although Phillips doesn’t apply the paradigm of missing out explicitly to our notions of beauty, or of style as the means to achieving it, reading his book convinced me that this daily habit of getting dressed, getting a new chance to be, or to appear, in some way that we long ago decided we should be, or deserved to be, or wanted to be, allows us to live a fruitful double life, both the one that never happens and the one that always does. It’s a way to practice for reality and also reality itself, a dress rehearsal and the performance.

"Being happy with what you currently have and aspiring for something better are not mutually exclusive."

"What is your aspiration in life?"