There is an ongoing and historical project to optimise this life in which we have come to play the executive role. We assumed this role from our parents; it was partly handed to us and partly seized, but at the very outset we had no claim to it and so it can still at times seem like an imposed burden. To speak of a project is also to speak of the situation that it is a part of and to which it answers, and this situation is one of continual change and partial predictability, the perfect microcosmic evolutionary environment. We have some freedom to experiment, to adopt tactics of various kinds, attack, delay, retreat, feint, and so on and also to redefine the parameters of success and our assumed degree of responsibility for decisions. This freedom however is generally less than it appears, since the information on which our decisions are based is always already contaminated. Sometimes the only significant decision concerns the degree to which we will apply our intelligence to the current situation, clarifying our knowledge of it and the available options; the alternative, to be guided by an unreflective intuition, is always available and is not necessarily the worst, since the situation is always much larger than the segment of it accessible to us. This is a rough sketch of how it appears, you can fill in the details and make whatever changes seem necessary. The real point is the use of the subjective point of view, the 'we' language, and that this kind of recognisable scenario as what is lived exactly marks one of the doorways through which the notional self as object enters on the scene. But in this way of looking at things there is only ever process, and if there is a reified self in there it is at best the misclassification of an address. That this error has consequences is a simple fact about the process, and certainly affords no grounds for compounding it by blaming the self for the inevitable shortcomings of itself.