A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts. In a different connection, we have already spoken of the tendency there was to look into the past, to help make the present, with all its horrors, less real. But in robbing the present of its reality there lay a certain danger.

Carl Jung once wrote, “The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of a diminution of personality.” Eventually the costs become too high. The person at the end of this task realizes that there is a spiritual hunger that’s been unmet, a desire to selflessly serve some cause, to leave some legacy for others.