Raison D'être

The following pearl of wisdom showed up in my inbox this morning, courtesy of Adam Khan, creator of MoodRaiser.com, among other websites:

"Man is by nature a productive organism. When he ceases his productivity — whether he is producing a pail or a poem, an industry or an ideology — his life begins to lose its meaning. Though he may be finally buried twenty years after his death, the person who has no raison d'être is not really alive. He is merely the ghost of who he once was or might have become."
-- Allen Wiesen, psychologist