Granted, but your soul-sucking middle manager job that you took to get the money gradually destroys you. You come home tired, your wife grows alternately bored and angry with you. Your kids resent you-- secretly, at first, then more and more openly. You can't make it to your son's football games because of work. He becomes more and more despondent and stops playing. His grades slip. He's no longer a jock, no longer a popular kid. Even the "losers" won't hang with him for his previous crimes against them. He is, more than anyone else at his school, Alone. Despite it all, it makes him stronger. He will overcome this difficulty, but never his hatred for you, the distance he feels from that man he calls "father," a word ever more devoid of meaning.
Your neighbors are all happier than you. Your marriage is falling apart... but there aren't any arguments. No, you never argued. She would just smile and bear it. But that silence was a deadly one, one not borne from understanding, but acceptance of the truth-- you are married because it's less effort than getting a divorce. Her parents hate you. She hates you. She only stays with you for the kids. Who hate you.
But you have enough money for the tau army, and that once a week when your 40k club meets, you feel alive, young, energetic again. And sometimes you miss your old pod-dropping days, when you were young and foolish and poor and full of life every day and in love with her, and live, and 40k.
I wish for a bigger house.
