I matter to my daughter. In fact, I matter so much that she cries every time she thinks I'm not paying attention to her.

I matter to my wife, who constantly tells me how much she loves me and how grateful she is for the things I do.

I matter to my employer, or else I wouldn't have gotten a promotion and this office.

So why do I feel like I'm immaterial?

I feel as though, these days, I serve to perform a set number of functions. I look after our one-year-old; I clean up the house; I make some of our meals; I perform my requisite managerial and coding duties here at work (when I'm not daylogging, anyway). Things are happy and safe and reasonably secure and really quite wonderful. It isn't as though I'm in some sort of crushing depression, or paralyzed with anxiety about the future. My daughter, more often than not, makes me deliriously happy, proud, and thankful to be a parent.

And yet...

So often, life just proceeds. I can't put my finger on it, but so often I just feel like I'm passing the time. And I think it's because the peaks and valleys of the past have smoothed out. You see, a few years back was a ridiculously tumultuous time. It was a year of unemployment in 2002, followed by years of struggling to help rebuild a company and simultaneously pull us out of debt. It was years of friends graduating from college and entering crazy, young, hip, single lives. It was hedonism and unpredictability at every excuse and every opportunity. It was the first time in my life that I actually felt like I was a part of this big, crazy, fun group. Crushing lows of failing to get jobs, struggling to pay the bills, or transferring balances from one credit card to another yet again were medicated by dizzying highs of overnight parties and groups that lightly tested the boundaries of intimacy.

But things settled down, and not just for my wife and I. Friends moved into the professional world. Many folks moved out of the state to pursue their various careers. Others moved into city apartments. Driving out to the suburbs was no longer economical nor cool; why should they, when so many of them lived in the city, and there was so much to do there? Meanwhile, my own hangups found me reluctant to drive into the city; outwardly, my arguments ranged from saying that I sucked at parallel parking and hated frenetic city traffic (which was true) to arguing that we had a single-family house and therefore more room (as though that really made a difference). Inwardly, the real reason was that entertaining at home gives me a comfort zone, a place where I can retreat into my own bedroom if I start feeling sick or uncomfortable.

Some friends drifted away slowly due to physical and emotional distance. Former common interests were no longer common as tastes changed. Others split violently after giant fights that ended in resentment and name-calling. The parties stopped. Casual get-togethers dwindled. There was no chatting on IRC anymore. The only remnant was blog posts that let us know what everybody else was up to.

Nowadays I post blog entries, or leave comments on others' blogs, and I am lucky to get one or two responses. The rest are sucked into a digital black hole. I find myself wondering if most of those people supposedly on my "friends list" even read anything I write anymore. There are perhaps three people in this world, other than family or coworkers, that I still consider friends, and sometimes I even feel light-years away from them.

I am delighted to come home and hear my daughter squeal "HI!" when I open the door. She is definitely the shining beacon in my entire life. But sometimes I look back on those crazy days when I really felt like I was connected to something important, and miss them. I am a father, a husband, a Team Lead Engineer, a homeowner... but sometimes I miss being a "person that other people want to hang out with."