The prominent psychologist Larry Crabb maintained that in periods of economic uncertainty:

• Women’s security feels threatened. They worry that the mortgage won’t be paid, and their children will go without.
• Men’s fears, on the other hand, go much deeper. Their significance is threatened.

As men, just what is this psychological need we have for significance? Significance is the belief that your life makes a lasting difference. No man wants to get to the end of his life and believe that his earthly existence was not important in some way. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard put it like this: “Every person must find some way to justify their existence.”

What are the ways and means men call on to stave off the universal fear that their lives are not worth anything? Tennessee Williams is considered by many to be America’s greatest playwright. His plays reveal a keen insight into the human heart. One of my favorite plays (also made into an acclaimed movie in 1958, starring Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor) was his Pulitzer Prize winning play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

This story involves the history of a troubled wealthy family, who live on a large country estate in Mississippi. The patriarch of the family is an older, intimidating man whom they call Big Daddy. Brick, one of his two sons, is an aging football hero who struggles with alcohol. He is married to Maggie, who goes by the nickname of Cat. Brick and Maggie, who are childless, have a turbulent relationship primarily because of Brick’s neglect of her. However, Brick goes even further to infuriate Maggie by conspicuously ignoring his brother’s ambitions to gain control of the family’s fortune.

At the end of the movie version, Big Daddy learns that he does not have long to live. He and Brick have a pointed exchange wherein Big Daddy describes to Brick the tension that exists between gaining wealth and finding a lifetime of significance:

I am worth 10 million dollars in cash and blue chip stocks, but there is only one thing you can’t buy on any market on earth, and that’s your life when you know it is finished . . . The human animal is a beast that must eventually die, and if he has money, he buys and he buys and he buys, and he hopes one of the things he buys is life everlasting.

Clearly, the life everlasting that Big Daddy refers to is not to be taken in a spiritual sense but rather as his desire that his earthly life would have some type of permanence. He did not want to be forgotten. Brick asks Big Daddy why he so desperately wants grandkids. The answer is revealing:

I want a part of me to keep on living. I won’t have my life end at the grave.

At the end of his life, Big Daddy has realized that the wealth he had accumulated over the course of a lifetime could never purchase what he most desired: significance.

In a commencement address the famous presidential biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin captured this same truth when speaking of President Lyndon B. Johnson:

A month before he died, he spoke to me with immense sadness in his voice. He said he was watching the American people absorbed in a new president, forgetting him, forgetting even the great civil rights laws that he had passed. He was beginning to think his quest for immortality had been in vain, that perhaps he would have been better off focusing his time and attention on his wife and his children, so then he could have had a different sort of immortality through his children and their children in turn. He could have depended on them in a way he couldn’t depend on the American people. But it was too late. Four weeks later he was dead. Despite all his money and power he was completely alone when he died, his ultimate terror realized.

It is hard to believe a man could achieve the office of what is arguably the most powerful leader in the world and not feel like his life has had much enduring value. Yet sadly, that is how his life ended.

Richard E Simmons III is the founder and Executive Director of The Center for Executive Leadership and a best-selling author.