“Missing Out- In Praise of the Unlived Life” by Adam Phillips

In this collection of essays Phillips mulls over one’s parallel life- the unlived life. He claims, “our lives are defined by loss, but loss of what might have been; loss, that is, of things never experienced.” These missed opportunities or forks in the road never really leave us. They are forever lodged in our brains as comparisons of and reference points to our actual lives. “In our unlived lives we are rather more transgressive than we tend to be in our lived lives.” Are these unlived lives the lives we really wanted to have? And when we interact with others, we are not only interacting with their pasts, but with the pasts they might have had- their own alternate possibilities. “Each member of a couple…. is always having a relationship, wittingly or unwittingly, with their partner’s unlived lives; their initial and initiating relationship is between what they assume are their potential selves.” 

Phillips begins by writing “On Frustration”. We do not always get what we want. What we want is often something that only another person can give (or so we think). “If someone can satisfy you they can frustrate you. Only someone who gives you satisfaction can give you frustration…. To fall in love is to be reminded of a frustration that you didn’t know you had.” In the end, this dependence on others and on the outside world to relieve one’s desire is bound to cause frustration. “Perhaps we are permanently enraged, taking revenge on ourselves for not being sufficient for ourselves, and taking revenge on others for never giving us quite what we want.”

Phillips’ second essay is “On Not Getting It”. “We might consider what it would be to live a life in which getting it is not always the point, in which there is nothing, to all intents and purposes, to get…. Getting it, as a project or a supposed achievement, can itself sometimes be an avoidance; an avoidance, say, of our solitariness or our singularity or our unhostile interest and uninterest in other people.”

Phillips’ next essay is “On Getting Away with It”. “The child’s first successful lie against the parents is his first moment of independence.” But when did getting away with it become such a good thing? “What is it like to live in a culture in which the thing people like to say is, ‘I got away with it’, in which this is a boast?” And do we ever truly get away with it anyhow? “The mind, at least in the Freudian story, is also the place where, as Hamlet remarks, no one ever gets away with anything. What Lacan calls ‘the obscene super-ego’ is far more scrupulous in its attentions, and more brutal in its punishments, than external authority can ever be.” Truly getting away with it means not feeling guilty- a culture where the sociopath is idealized, where “the clever would displace the pious.”

Phillips’ next essay is “On Getting Out of It”. But do we ever know what exactly we are getting out of? “Perhaps more often than we realize, we live as if we know more about the experiences we don’t have than about the experiences we do have.” If only I had done this, that, and the other, things would have turned out this way for sure. But these unlived experiences are often the bar by which we judge our lived lives. “It is not unusual, say, for each member of a couple to know exactly what is missing in their partner; and to know, by the same token, how their lives would be different, that is, so much better, if their partner would change in particular ways.”

Phillips closes with an essay “On Satisfaction”. The question is if we can ever be satisfied? If the answer is no, is the reason because what we think will be satisfactions when only wishes are not really satisfactions when lived in reality? Or is it because we have substituted out our real wants for what is available to us in actual life? “How do you know what your desire is? Is it that which makes you feel guilty when you betray it; not when you betray someone else, but when you betray yourself; indeed, for Lacan self-betrayal, the self-betrayal of giving up one’s desire, is the source of guilt.” The only life we can truly draw experiences from is our lived life. “What we learn from experience is that experience keeps stripping us of dearly held beliefs, about ourselves and others. We can’t afford to live as though certain things are true about ourselves. Our satisfactions have to be realigned.” Life interferes with our beliefs. Phillips finishes with an appendix “On Acting Madness.” It is important to remember, “when we think of the lives we may have led, there are lives we are relieved to have missed out on” too.