Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

I will admit that the end lacked the same substance as the beginning, but the beginning makes the book worth reading. Reading the reviews I was surprised to see so many negative comments, although upon reflection, the book is obviously not for everyone. I bought it after reading Joan Acocella's review in the New Yorker. She did not particularly like the book or understand it, so I figured there was probably something there. I was not disappointed.

"In Praise of the Unlived Life," the subtitle of Adam Phillips' new book, his seventeenth, hooked me. Not so surprising since Stephen Vizinczey's classic "In Praise of Older Women - The Amorous Reflections of A.V." sits next to "Thy Neighbor's Wife" by Gay Talese in my bookcase. So what, I wanted Phillips to tell me, am I missing out on?Quite a lot, it turns out. Paradoxically, he asserts, we have become experts in what we don't know and know-little's about what we think we do know. When the going gets tough at work or at home, as our frustration builds with the knots we tie ourselves up in, we develop "omniscience" about what awaits us in our unlived lives. It's not until we leave the job or abandon the family that the green pastures we projected turn out to be less nourishing than the life we confidently expected awaited us.There are a couple of reasons for this. Not only is it impossible to fully know ourselves, more importantly, we can never know what goes on with anyone else, not our children, not our parents, not our wives or sweethearts. So we can't l know how things will turn out if we stay put and try to work out solutions to our frustrations, and we certainly can't know how we will feel with the new job or partner in the unlived life we opted for. To that degree, the book's subtitle title is, if not misleading, disingenuous. Since we can't know the unlived life - we never reach it -- the praise we cloak it in is a mirage.Phillips, a psychoanalyst with years of practice under his belt, has extensive experience to support his conclusions. Moreover, he is sharp as a tack, extremely well read in his field and out, and a writer the New York Times described as "poetic, paradoxical, repetitive and punning." (Shelia Heit's review "Second Selves" appeared in the January 20, 2013 Sunday Book Review.) What more could you ask for?End note. In fact, there is more: the book's appendix titled "On Acting Madness." It tackles what it means to actor, audience and to our understanding of the terrors of madness to perform the role of a madman on stage. Phillips discusses "MacBeth", "King Lear" and David Holman's dramatization of Gogol's "Diary of a Madman." What makes Phillips' essay so telling is that it assumes that madness "represents one of our unlived lives, something that might have happened to us..."

Loved this book. I think I bought it on accident and I loved its insights. A little over-written and ridiculous at times, but still a wonderful book well worth the effort of getting through some of its tougher passages. 4 stars

Interesting topic, but overly convoluted writing

Reading Adam Phillips' "Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life" is like driving in New York City traffic - at first it's unnerving, confusing and one isn't quite sure what to make of it; but after a while, if you steel your will, continue the effort and don't pull off to the side of the road, you fall into its own particular rhythms, go with the flow, and it all begins to make intoxicating sense. I found this book to be one of the most powerful and, at the same time, one of the most difficult books I've ever read. But I arrived at my destination exhilarated, with few dents and scratches, and feeling as though it had been well worth the effort to stay focused on where this book can take you.

I purchased the Kindle version of this book because I believed the author's basic premise was an important one and I wanted to read more about how I can spend less time regretting what didn't happen in my life and more time focusing on living the life I have. I was disappointed to discover that although the author had a good idea for a book, he had no idea what to write about it. The author does a fair job of explaining the premise of the book in the prologue, which I believe can be summarized in one sentence: You are devoted to ruining the life you have by fretting over the life or lives that you didn't have. I expected that the author would follow up the prologue with some suggestions that would help people realize the importance of enjoying and appreciating the life they are living, while at the same time avoiding regret and sadness over what they perceive to be unfulfilled potential, bad luck, mistakes, wrong turns, and so on. Instead, it seems the author conceived of this book as a philosophical treatise on the meaning of frustration and satisfaction. I could accept this if it were meaningful and well-written, but it is not. The author writes long, wordy, and pretentious sentences that seemed designed to impress us with the profundity of his thought and the erudition of his learning. In addition, he has the annoying habit of interrupting his own sentences with hyphenated clauses, as well as randomly inserting the phrase, "whatever it is" throughout the book. Here is a sample of his so-called sentences:"What experiences are made possible by not getting it, and what getting it, whatever it is, might protect us from.""Frustration is always, whatever else it is, a temptation scene;""We can get out only by presuming an omniscience about what we are getting out of; which is always, whatever else it is, an omniscience about the satisfactions we seek.""But it would be sensible to believe that if we have misconstrued the whole notion of frustration - or if our frustrations are difficult to construe - we might have misunderstood the nature of satisfaction: had the meaning but missed the experience."You are probably thinking you might understand these sentences if you read them in context. Maybe, but don't plan on it. The author seems lost in a world of abstraction, following a thought process that has little relevance for those of us who might be looking for help with getting on with our lives. If the author had focused on the needs of his readers rather than on fashioning an image as a pipe-smoking, turtle-neck wearing philosopher, he might have written a book worth reading. As it stands, it is a book to be avoided.

Phillips is prolific but this book touches a nerve because today's world's organising principle seems to be to stimulate the economy through inspiring Fear of Missing Out. I didn't find this book the antidote I was hoping for but the first half contained some interesting ideas though they are presented in a long-winded way.

The book provides a series of provocations on the topic of frustration. Far from providing ready answers, Phillips develops his thoughts into a series of provocations that leave the reader to think and find their own conclusions. As such, you will sometimes feel like putting the book down and reflecting on a particular point before proceeding to the next section.

Libro affascinante e profondo che ci aiuta a fare pace con noi stessi e il nostro passato. Nulla a che vedere con i libri self-help e new age superficiali ed inutili.Riguardo la precedente recensione, mi sembra ovvio che chi acquista un libro in inglese conosca la lingua. Qualora non esistesse già, auspico una traduzione in italiano.

This book is about what we spend a lot of time on but rarely think in our waking lives. The so called life or lives we could or would like to live but are unable to.

I loved this book, and expect to be re-reading it for a long time to come. I came to it from the copious recommendations on the Brain Pickings blog.General comments - Philips' prose style is not easy to read. He expects you to read his words with the same sort of care that a psychotherapist listens to the words of an analysand. So you have to invest a bit of attention. This is necessary in the same way that a warm-up is necessary before a work-out. If you can't do this, you won't be develop the mental muscles you need to put his ideas into practice (and that is the idea).This is not pop psychology or a how-to manual. You have to accept a lot of the basic precepts of Freudian psychology, although Philips is willing to point out when he hits the limits of this approach. He also draws on the work of those who have taken Freud's tools and developed them, like Winnicott and Bion. But if you think Freudian psychology is poppycock, then you won't like this book. There is a lot of analysis, and that is not everyone's cup of tea.What I've taken away from the book - it's about "getting it", both in terms of getting what you want, and understanding (getting) what you want. He also goes into ideas of what "getting away with it" means, and what revenge means in terms of getting satisfaction. And how satisfaction can generally be a form of revenge. He does this using King Lear and Othello as his main texts, and I would say that if you are a fan of these, two of Shakespeare's plays, then his analysis of them more than justifies the book.This brief paragraph doesn't do justice to the density of the analysis and the precision of the prose. There's the occasional bravura flourish or allusion that could be read as "showing off". Even that criticism opens up an interesting avenue of analysis of what we mean when we say "showing off", though, and that's what I liked about the book. I've already re-read this book, and started on "One Way And Another", and it's doing me a lot of good, unobtrusively, like a course of psychotherapy!