We’re bombarded by well-meaning motivators warning us how steep the psychological cost of an unlived life is. What exactly do they mean? That you’re not fully alive or present in your own life? That you’re not fulfilling your potential? Not realizing your dreams?

We live in a society so obsessed with the “fear of missing out” that we’ve shorthanded it to FOMO. It is a constant feeling that we should have a better life, says British psychoanalytic writer, Adam Phillips, in his controversial book, ‘Missing Out: In praise of an unlived life’.

The first sentence in his book is: “The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining?” This may seem an odd question “until one realizes how much of our so-called mental life is about the lives we are not living, the lives we are missing out on, the lives we could be leading but for some reason are not,” Adam writes.

“What we fantasize about, what we long for, are the experiences, the things and the people that are absent. It is the absence of what we need that makes us think, that makes us cross and sad . . . We refer to them 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.”

“And what was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives. Indeed, our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live. But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are,” he writes.

Adam says that if we’re always haunted by the myth of our potential, we end up sharing our lives with the people we’ve failed to be. It makes our lives a perpetual falling-short, a continuing loss, a funeral song to roads not taken.

“So we may need to think of ourselves as always living a double life, the one that we wish for and the one that we practice; the one that never happens and the one that keeps happening.”
Adam wants people to take responsibility for the life they’re living, instead of feeling that they have been forced to settle for it. He quotes Randall Jarrell: “The way we miss our lives is life.”

According to Adam, unlived lives reveal themselves most clearly in envy of others and the demands parents place on children. Swiss psychologist and psychoanalyst, Carl Gustav Jung, writes that “the greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.”

In ‘The burden of unlived lives: The extensive consequences of intergenerational trauma’, Anny Papatheodorou writes about collective or historical trauma passed down the generations in families affected by events such as the Holocaust.

She also writes about the intrinsic desire to lead meaningful lives and when this potential is not reached, it can leave a feeling of purposelessness and dissatisfaction which can be passed down the generations.

Anny says that children might start emulating the ‘stuckness’ their parents feel and might spend much of their own lives trying to compensate for and overcome this. They might try to “fix or rescue” parents, prioritize their parents’ needs, while forsaking their own or become emotionally withdrawn with Trojan defences.

So, it is not just the obvious examples, such as pressuring children to achieve the athletic or academic success their parents never could, that can do damage. According to Anny most of us inherit some degree of ancestral trauma. The point is not to blame, but to become aware of it and then to realize that you don’t have to live someone else’s life. Neither do you have to share your head space with the people you never became.

The focus shouldn’t be on “missing out”, on absence or lack, but on authenticity. This requires letting go of everything that is inauthentic. Dawna Markova writes that a major clean-up is needed when the inner walls to your soul are graffitied with “advertisements, commercials and the opinions of everyone who has ever known and labelled you”.

She says that when you have the courage to shape your life from the essence of who you are, you become truly alive. You ignite. You get to fully inhabit your days, girlfriend.