I once met a celebrated psychiatrist who told me how he picked up his daughter every morning at his former wife’s house and took the little girl—I think she was 10—to breakfast. He said it was the high point of his day. “What do you talk about?” I asked. “We talk about what we’d do if we won the lottery.” “Every day?” Yes, pretty much every day: there had already been an entire year of lottery-winner talk, and there was apparently more to come. At the time, I thought the guy, smart as he was, was implanting some questionable values. But later I changed my mind. What better way for a young girl—and her father too—to figure out who they might be than by figuring out what they would want if they could have anything at all? Psychoanalysis is generally the analysis of suppressed desires, but it might make some progress by taking overt desires seriously too.
UVa Professor Mark Edmundson in an excellent and most readable essay on the bores in life. Good stuff, if a little long-winded (appropriately enough).
Thanks to Veronica for the pointer.