Eugene O'Kelly was at the top of his game. The 53-year-old chairman and chief executive of KPMG1) in the US was working hard, supporting a happy family, maintaining a busy social life and making plans for a long, well-earned retirement.

In May 2005, he went for a check-up with a neurologist2) to investigate a slight facial droop. A scan revealed he was suffering from terminal brain cancer and had only three months to live.

As Mr. O'Kelly explains in Chasing Daylight, his account, published posthumously, of his final weeks of life, he looked on this news as a kind of blessing. He would have 100 days to make a good death: to say goodbye to colleagues, friends and family, and to plan a future for his wife and children. Like the accountant he was, Mr. O'Kelly wanted to close the book on his life and leave his affairs in good order.

The diagnosis also got him thinking about his career and what it had truly meant. "Before my illness, I had considered commitment king among virtues," he writes. "After I was diagnosed, I came to consider consciousness king among virtues.?"

Mr. O'Kelly now believed, like Socrates, that "the unconsidered life is not worth living.?And he felt sorry for colleagues and peers who had not had the chance to reflect more seriously on their lives.

"I lamented that they had not been blessed as I had, with this jolt to life," he writes. "They had no real motivation or clear timeline to stop what they were so busy at, to step back, to ask what exactly they were doing with their life. Many of them had money; many of them had more money than they needed. Why was it so scary to ask themselves one simple question: why am I doing what I'm doing?"

But of course that is a scary question — because the honest answer may be devastating3). Having chosen their career path at an early age, some professionals find themselves at or near the top of their organisations in their mid-40s to late 40s. With good health and solid finances they may have another 40 years of comfortable living ahead of them.

Money is not the problem. Fulfillment is. Career goals may have been met, but the excitement and pleasure the job once offered are now a distant memory. Worse, there may seem to be no alternative to going on in this way for another 10 or 15 years.

It must be a dismal prospect. No wonder so many bosses prefer to keep their heads down and carry on as though all is well. But pursuing an ultimately meaningless career saps the will to live. It destroys family life. Eventual retirement looms not as a release but as a daunting life sentence.

Perhaps the word "career" is part of the problem. The writer Charles Handy believes we need to think differently about how we approach the business of earning our living over the course of five decades.

Instead of one career, we can have several lives, he says. We should experiment, move on, not consider the corporation as a kind of parent or safe-house. People who have had only one life tend to be rather boring, professor Handy adds.

But, as Mr. O'Kelly writes, the hurried executive finds little or no time to conduct this sort of analysis. The very busy-ness of business militates4) against reflection.

The new wave of twenty-something job applicants have wholly different expectations — and demands. Even blue-chip5) recruiters are being challenged to explain what sort of "work-life balance" they will offer to their new employees. How flexibly can people work? Will sabbaticals6) or career-breaks be available?

A recent "campus brochure" for PwC7) in the US showed a young man cartwheeling8) on a beach, beside the slogan: "Your life. You can bring it with you.?

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