Dying is not, I hope, such a big deal if you are not sick. (Knock on wood!) But nearing the end of your productive life without having been President of the United States or won a Nobel Prize or even have some modest recognition, makes one wonder what it was all for.
If you're a guy and you had a traditional marriage (that has fallen apart), whatever great deeds of your kids are really, at most, influenced by your wife. You were just putting a roof over your family and bringing home the bacon. Not luxuriously.
If you have worked in in a certain field nearly 30 years it's galling when people ask you if you work with an employee of yours.
If you ended up in an obscure field so obscure that people will tell you to your face "that's boring." That's disappointing.
You're 60-something and you have nothing to show for anything you did.
And, of course, there are resentful people who hate you or envy you or are just mean to you. Some of it deserved, no doubt.
What was it all for? Why doesn't it just end, already?
