“We are always haunted by the myth of our potential, of what we might have it in ourselves to be or do. […]. We share our lives with the people we have failed to be. Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and desires sacrificed, to possibilities refused, to roads not taken. We refer to this as our unlived lives because somewhere we believe that they were open to us; but for some reason—and we might spend a great deal of our lived lives trying to find and give the reason— they were not possible. […W]e know more now than ever before about the kind of lives it is possible to live. We discover these unlived lives most obviously in our envy of other people, and in our daily frustrations. The myth of our potential can make of our lives a perpetual falling-short, a continual and continuing loss, a sustained and sometimes sustaining rage. [It] makes of our frustrations a secret life of grudges. Even if we set aside the inevitable questions—how would we know if we had realized our potential? Where do 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.”
— Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
