Reads needlessly melancholic, depressive, bleak. Significance is just one of several human needs. Not everyone is driven by that particular need.

Then there's this bit:

> Eventually, he met a woman and chose a place – the best woman and the best place – and his future was fixed. The world was good, but the world was no longer full of all these possibilities. What, then, fills the void where possibility once lived?

One's failure to find other ways to sate the desire for growth, contribution, and variety (other fundamental human needs) should not be mistaken as an inherent impossibility to find growth, contribution, and variety in one's middle age.

I wouldn't call a piece that confirms prior biases particularly powerful. As I've grown older, I've learned to differentiate depressive from powerful. I'd rather reserve the latter for labeling that which actually gives me power, rather than take it away.