Meaning
What the work is for, and what counts as a life well spent.
The provisional life
Deferring the thing you most want to do until conditions are right — which is not procrastination, and is not fixed by willpower. Three mechanisms that make it feel like maturity, and the one intervention that works.
The regret of starting late
Not being behind on a project — being behind on a life. What to do when the window has actually closed on some of it, and why 'it's never too late' is addressed to somebody in a different situation from yours.
Diminishing marginal utility
Each additional unit of something is worth less than the one before it. The first slice, the first thousand dollars, the first hour of free time are worth more than the tenth, and the decline is usually steeper than people expect.
Ikigai
A Japanese word for what makes life feel worth living. The four-circle diagram attached to it in the West — passion, mission, vocation, profession — is not Japanese and has nothing to do with the original concept.
Intrinsic and instrumental value
Something has instrumental value if it is worth having for what it gets you, and intrinsic value if it is worth having for itself. The distinction is Aristotle's and it is the question underneath almost every complaint about a life that is going well.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs
Abraham Maslow's 1943 proposal that human motives fall into classes — physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, self-actualization — with the lower ones generally more urgent when unmet. Maslow did not draw a pyramid and did not say the order was strict.
Memento mori
Remember that you will die — a practice, not a mood. Used by the Stoics, the Epicureans, the medieval Church and the Buddhist traditions for the same purpose: the prospect of an ending sorts what matters from what is merely loud.
Regret minimization
Choosing by asking which option you would regret more at eighty, rather than by comparing expected outcomes now. Jeff Bezos gave the phrase its currency; the move is much older and is a way of correcting for a bias in the present.
Relative deprivation
Dissatisfaction produced by comparison with a reference group rather than by conditions themselves. People asked how they are doing answer relative to whoever they are standing next to, and the reference group is rarely chosen deliberately.
The deferred life plan
Organizing life in two stages — do the unwanted thing now, live afterward — where the second stage is indefinitely postponed because its trigger condition keeps moving. Randy Komisar named the pattern in 2000.
The hedonic treadmill
The tendency to return to a stable level of contentment after a change in circumstances, good or bad. The gain is real and the feeling of it fades, which is why the next thing has to be larger to register at all.
What to do after leaving the church
Separate the three problems you have just acquired — belief, belonging and work — and solve them in that order of urgency, which is usually the reverse of how loudly they present. The belief question can wait. The network you just lost cannot, and neither can income.