One day we’re carefree children and then in a blink of an eye, we become responsible adults. That means we work. And we work and then when we’re done working, we work some more.

In his song “The Pretender,” Jackson Browne sings, “I’m gonna be a happy idiot and struggle for the legal tender.” To be honest, work does bring the satisfaction of accomplishment, and providing for our families certainly can’t be undervalued.

Yet the average person spends 90,000 hours in a lifetime at work. Another study says that the sweet spot for having leisure time is three and a half hours per day. Anything less suggests we work too much. Anything more isn’t good either. We don’t like to have too much idle time.

I was very fortunate to have had an emotionally rewarding career for 38 years and now I love writing stories and columns for this newspaper. Overall, 45 percent of the American working force, however, is either unhappy with their jobs or unsettled enough to listen with interest for other opportunities, and that’s regardless of how much money is made. Some who make six figures or more are highly stressed while others are content to make much less because the workplace environment keeps them satisfied.

At a cocktail party, the usual icebreaker question is “What do you do for a living? Rather than reply with some long explanation of job duties which no one really cares to hear about, I would think to answer, “I love the people I care about. I spend time with my friends. I watch sports. I fish. I write. I think. That’s what I do for a living, and by the way, I go to work, too.”

As much as I loved my career, I always thought that my job was not the center of my life. I’ve known far too many people who have worked exhausting hours to such a degree that they were hardly ever home. When I would ask someone why do you work so much, I heard, “Got to pay for the lifestyle.” My response was, “Do you mean the lifestyle you’re not living because you’re always working?”

And I was pretty good at figuring out another reason why others worked so many hours. They didn’t like being home. That’s a sad state of affairs if you ask me.

Nobody has ever asked to be born into this life. And then we learn that much of childhood is play and much of adulthood is work. But we’re here for just a short while and while some of us robotically pass time through the years, there are others like me who wonder if there’s a larger purpose to our existence.

When I taught high school English and philosophy, I would ask my teenage students, “What are you here for?” When we studied poetry, there were many answers for this question to help students ponder their purpose. They had some difficulty comprehending the themes of poems by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe, and yet they wanted to learn about love, about dreams, about struggle, those intangibles that awaken the human soul into a journey of self-discovery.

In the movie, “Dead Poets Society,” Robin Williams plays the part of a teacher in an all-boys school where traditional learning prepares students for economic success in the wealthiest of professions. Williams bucks the system and teaches them that there is much more to life than accumulating material wealth.

In one scene, he draws his students close to his voice and he says, “We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race, and the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” Then he adds, “No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.”

Thinking outside the box of mechanical daily obligations can cause emotional restlessness. We want to do more with our lives than make money and buy things. We worry far too much about mortgage debt and credit card interest, the price of gas, and the bag of groceries that holds four items that costs $35. Somebody once wrote, “You weren’t born to just pay bills and die.”

Of course, we writers and teachers like to look for the greater meaning of life. Professor of literature Joseph Campbell wrote, “Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.”

Eighteenth century German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe puts the idea into our heads that we are afraid to have the time to think about the meaning of our existence. “The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.”

What’s most important for finding happiness and self-fulfillment? Philosophical essayist C. Joy Bell C. says, “I have learned that you can go anywhere you want to go and do anything you want to do and buy all the things that you want to buy and meet all the people that you want to meet and learn all the things that you desire to learn and if you do all these things but are not madly in love: you have still not begun to live.”

I have spent a good part of my life wanting to know what makes me breathe and learn why I was dropped into this universe. I have found the answers in my relationship with God and Mother Nature and in helping young people find their way to realizing their dreams. But the greatest joy of living is to love and to be loved, and I have found that, too.

Forgive me for asking, but now I turn the question toward the one who read this column. “What are YOU here for?”

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com.