You're good at solving problems you don't care about

Come, let us examine what your days are actually serving. Skill is not meaning, and you have been living on skill — competence gives a small real pleasure, the click of a solved puzzle, but it is thin fuel that spends itself the instant the puzzle is solved and leaves nothing if the puzzle did not matter; a life is made meaningful not by the difficulty of the problems it solves but by whether they were worth solving, and a man superbly good at what is not worth doing is only more deeply trapped. Ask, as Marcus did each morning, what the work is for — he re-tethered each day''s labour to a reason worth it, and you have skipped that so long your work has come loose from any why; the hollowness is not a mood to push through but a true signal that the line between your effort and anything you value has been severed. And bend your work, by degrees, toward what you value — you are rarely as trapped as the hollowness insists, so find the degrees of freedom, the problems in reach that do matter, the purpose even indifferent work can be turned toward, and the slow move toward work worth your finite days; aim your considerable skill at what matters, beginning with one problem chosen because it is worth solving. What would be worth your skill, if you let yourself aim it there?