I'm going to throw this out to the group, and see what people think.

I grew up in a family where my parents were really seriously married. My mother may have been one of the few women on earth who was genuinely a living, breathing example of NAWALT. I can remember, for example, criticizing my father once and having her hit me across the face. She was up every morning at 6 to make breakfast for everyone. She saw him through the last, difficult years of his life, took great care of him, and is now a widow. They really, genuinely loved and respected each other, and were an incredible team. She's now financially secure, very well taken care of, content and happy.

As a result, I always thought that's how it worked. I had no idea that marriage could be any other way. As a result, I was an absolute sitting duck for my now ex-wife, who is one of the few people on Earth I genuinely wish was dead. In the divorce, I was separated from my three daughters, who were moved across the country. The reality of that literally almost killed me. It took a long, long time for me to recover, but in the last several months, for the first time in at least ten years, I'm financially secure, successful, and do not have any kind of gun at my head. I spent many years either on the run, terrified or just under incredible pressure. I was actually homeless for a while.

And here's the issue. My motivation has evaporated. I could not have seen that coming. I used to get up every morning, and go, because I had to. Now, I don't have to. And I'm a little lost. I'm not unhappy, but I'm just sort of floating here.

I'm not rich. I still have to work. I'm in my fifties, so I'm nowhere near ready to retire -- I don't think I ever will. But now that the desperation is gone, I am having a really hard time finding a reason to dig in and hustle again. I like to work. I can't just go fishing for a month, or travel or whatever. But today is a perfect example. I have plenty of money in the bank. I don't really need anything. I work for myself, so I don't have a boss, or meetings, or anything like that. I've been to the gym, gotten a haircut, can answer some emails. I have some client work to do, but I could do it tomorrow or Sunday. But I don't really have to do everything. Everything's okay. And I don't know what the fuck to do now.

I'm not looking for an answer here. I have to provide that for myself. But I have to figure out how to figure it out. The issue, when you get right down to it, is that I have been trained my entire life to work on the plantation, and I have seen it work out beautifully. But without it, I really am lacking a purpose. If I don't have a family -- daughters are old enough to kind of run their own lives -- why am I here? What am I doing? What matters to me? My drive, my purpose, my ambition have sort of dissolved. I spend a lot of time walking around, thinking, but the answers are slow in coming and sort of insubstantial. My entire identity is built around being part of a well-run plantation, and now I've been emancipated, and don't know what to do next now that my survival isn't at stake.

Anyone ever dealt with anything like this?