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Notes -
Your grocery clerk has failed to achieve social status in a world where that was ostensibly possible, where society inculcated a belief that he should pursue it, and where he did, in fact, invest considerable effort in pursuing it, in the form of 17 years of formal education.
On top of this, he has to contend with the fact that modern societies have broken down all formal and most informal barriers to mixing across status levels and have eliminated any material requirement for women to marry. As has been discussed ad nauseam at this point, in combination with female hypergamy this is very detrimental to his prospects with the opposite sex.
A final consideration is, to borrow a Marxist term, alienation of labor. Your clerk's job does produce value, but that value isn't some tangible thing. It's a benefit to the store in higher throughput or better loss prevention vs. self-checkout, on a spreadsheet he'll never see and doesn't care about because he has no ownership stake in the enterprise.
So, your grocery clerk is probably mostly sexless, and feels like an underachiever performing meaningless work, where, say, a medieval peasant farmer at the same age would be married, would have precisely the status society told him he would and should have, and would be engaged in work that directly, physically provided for an essential material need of his wife, his children, his aging parents. It's this difference, much more than any lack of a connection with the divine, that results in his dissatisfaction.
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