Meaning

What the work is for, and what counts as a life well spent.

• 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.