Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life by Adam Phillips

The habit of mind that Adam Phillips targets with his new book will be “embarrassingly familiar” to many readers.

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25)

The habit of mind that Adam Phillips targets with his new book will be “embarrassingly familiar” to many readers, said Sheila Heti in The New York Times. Many of us worry so much about the lives we have failed or are failing to live that the story each of us fashions about the time we’ve spent on this earth becomes about what we couldn’t or didn’t do. But Phillips, a British psychoanalyst with several books behind him, is a thinker less interested in self-help solutions than in wordplay and paradox. “He doesn’t argue in a linear fashion, but nestles ideas within ideas, like Russian dolls.” You might even suspect that he believes the best thing he can do to help us grapple with the subject of human frustration is to frustrate our desire for a clear takeaway.

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