Nostalgia for what we have lost is more bearable than nostalgia for what we have never had....

McLaughlin distinguishes two kinds of longing. Missing something once possessed can be painful, but it is anchored by memory: there was a real object, a real time, and therefore a kind of closure or proof that the desire was once satisfied. Longing for what one never had—an unlived life, an unrealized love, an opportunity that never arrived—can be harsher because it has no factual boundary; imagination keeps expanding the “might have been.” The quote suggests that grief is, paradoxically, easier to metabolize than yearning for pure possibility, and it hints at a practical ethic: attend to the present, because fantasies of the unlived can become more consuming than actual losses.